


Do Not Go Gentle

by verbaepulchellae



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Buffy The Vampire Slayer Fusion, Character Death, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Eventual Smut, F/M, PTSD, Slayer!Clarke, Slow Burn, dark themes, demon!bellamy, soul bonding, vampire!octavia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2018-01-14
Packaged: 2018-06-10 14:13:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 52,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6960328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verbaepulchellae/pseuds/verbaepulchellae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The form straightens and steps forward into the sharp shaft of light and Clarke sees a tall man, dark messy curls falling into his face, hands half curled into fists.</p>
<p>“Slayer?” He asks slowly, eyes intent on Clarke’s face.</p>
<p>“That’s right. As in Of Vampires. Alias: the Chosen One. Alias: The Light that Goes Bump in the Night, I can go on if I’m not ringing any bells, but I think you get the picture.”</p>
<p>“The Slayer,” the demon repeats, almost bitter, and shakes his head, a cruel smile twisting his mouth. He glances at the vampire next to him. She’s watching him hungrily, body tensed and low, ready to launch herself at Clarke again. </p>
<p>“Come on, Bell,” she half pleads, half growls. “Let me kill her.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

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> Because Clarke Griffin is the post apocalyptic Buffy Summers, and I couldn't resist. Mego42 is my inspiration and also the maker of this gorgeous art for this fic! I love you lady <3
> 
> Shout out to raincityruckus and rashaka for beta'ing and helping me brainstorm this monster.

Clarke dreams. 

She dreams of her first kills. She dreams of Wells’ cruel grip on her arm and the smirk on her father’s face as she begged them to tell her what was going on. She dreams of their familiar faces twisted into wrinkled, craggy imitations; of Well’s eyes turned yellow and fangs in her father’s mouth. 

She dreams of the wooden pencil she had snatched off the dining room table and the unknown instinct that drove that pencil into her father’s heart and the unknown strength that filled her as she twisted away from Wells and plunged that pencil again into his chest. She dreams of the burst of exploding bodies, of dust settling in her hair and stinging her eyes, making her vomit when she tasted it on her tongue. Dreams of sitting catatonic on her kitchen floor until her mom found her and held her, surrounded by the dust of the two people she had loved most in the world.

Clarke wakes.

It’s not so much with a gasp anymore, just the sudden shock of coming back to her body, eyes opening before the dark images from her dreams are replaced by benign yellow glow of morning. Sunlight floods her room, patchworked across the foot of her bed by her window, her blue covers glowing warmly. She uncurls her fingers from the stake that she slipped under her pillow last night after patrol and sits up, stares hard at the soft sheets of her bed and thinks of Raven’s bright laughter and Niylah’s lazy smile to fight against the sensory afterimages of Wells and her father seared into her mind. 

She looks at her hands, clean for now, flexes her fingers and tries not to think about the sensation of a soft coating of dust: paper dry skin and bones, powdered edition. It takes longer and longer to come back to herself after the nightmares, longer to slow the ache in her chest and the heavy pounding of her heart. It’s been five years. The average lifespan of a girl like her suggests she’s got four years left. Somedays she doesn’t know if she wants to make it that far.

Raven is blasting some upbeat, funky tune down in the kitchen that just manages to reverberate up to Clarke’s bedroom. Clarke smells bacon and fresh coffee and it’s motivation enough to pull on her bathrobe and trip down the stairs, find her equilibrium in the presence of her friend.

“Well, good morning, sleepy head,” Raven greets her brightly and pats Clarke’s cheek playfully when she props her chin on Raven’s shoulder to peer into the frying pan at the bacon and eggs. “I didn’t even hear you come in last night.”

“Yeah, I got back late,” Clarke says with a yawn and reaches for the pot to fill her mug, pours Raven a cup as well.

“Busy night? Lots of slayage?”

“Actually, it was pretty quiet until ‘round two am, then some Vamps decided they wanted to party. I shut it down pretty quick, but honestly. Demons have no respect for my sleep schedule.”

Raven snorts and grabs two plates, divvying up the bacon and eggs and sliding one of the plates down the counter to Clarke. “They really need to get their priorities straight.”

“You think I could make a general announcement? ‘Dear Vampires and Demons of Virginia: Please plan your nightly murder sessions for between 9pm and 12 am. Some of us have morning classes. Love, your neighborhood Slayer.’”

“Yeah, that’ll go over well,” Raven says with a smirk. “You could probably publish it in the Demon newsletter.”

“Fangs Weekly or Slayer Watch?” Clarke asks dryly, nibbling on her bacon. “I hear both have a pretty diverse readership.”

“Gotta love those literate demons,” Raven says and pours herself some orange juice as well. “You going in to see Kane before class?”

“Yeah, he’ll probably want stats, as always”

“Dear Diary,” Raven starts in a clear imitation of Kane, and Clarke snorts. “Last night Clarke killed more Vampires. I am very proud, she is my favorite Slayer. Love, Marcus.”

“To be fair,” Clarke says, laughing into her coffee. “I’m his only Slayer. You’re still his favorite demon hunter.”

“Yeah, but somehow being the Chosen One really gets you those extra brownie points,” Raven teases her. Something groovy comes up next on the pandora station and she makes Clarke laugh by swaying around the kitchen, helping to drive the nightmares further back into Clarke’s head as she watches her friend’s antics. Raven winces a bit when she moves to fast around the corner of the counter and her brace catches, her leg drags. She waves Clarke away when she starts towards her and bends to adjust her brace. 

“I’m fine. You know, one of these days, Monty and I are going to find that spell we need to make this brace actually keep up with me, and then I’m going to be right back out there with you, killing things.”

“Don’t worry,” Clarke assures her, “I’m saving the biggest and the baddest for you.”

“That’s why you’re my favorite Slayer too,” Raven says conspiratorially and then sits down to eat her breakfast like a normal human being. Clarke washes their dishes when she’s done and then heads back to her room to changes into something a little more college appropriate. She leaves Raven to tinker with whatever she’s working on these days in the room formerly known as their living room. She’s basically hijacked the space and turned into a little mechanic’s magic workshop, old rusty pieces of scrap metal and mechanical junk mixed in with spell books, and Clarke can just see Raven’s high ponytail bent over an old car motor as she’s on her way out the door. 

Business as usual.

Campus is a short walk from their apartment, just fifteen minutes, but the fresh autumn air does wonders to drive the last of Clarke’s nightmares from her head. She eyes the cemetery as she passes, more out of habit than expecting any demons to be actively causing trouble at eight in the morning. And out of habit, she checks for any newly dug graves, lets her eyes skip over the graves she knows to be empty. 

Ark U has three libraries. There’s the Science library just off the atrium of the biology building: a pleasant, first floor library lit in green and soft yellow with large windows that look out over the quad. The Main Library is a beautiful old building: stained glass windows and three floors, filled with comfy chairs and study carrels and of course work rooms. It’s a bright, happy place and during finals week, the mini cafe on the first floor serves free cookies and tea to anyone there past eleven pm. Clarke likes those libraries fine, but it's the Art Library she makes a beeline for.

Unlike the other two libraries, the Art Library has been given up by the administration and student body alike as a write off. It’s at the back of the small campus museum, a dusty, dark, half lofted space with a librarian who keeps odd hours and has unhelpfully limited knowledge about art resources. Most of the Art books have been transferred to the Main Library, and now the books that line the front shelves of the Art Library are old shabby volumes: archived, retired books the administration can’t seem to let go of in case they one day become valuable. Although the Art Library keeps its old name, it’s a running joke. No one goes there, except for a few quirky kids who seem to like the company of the gruff librarian.

The musty smell of the Art Library is comforting as Clarke pushes open the heavy doors. Kane keeps the entry lights purposefully low and the doors closed to discourage any ambitious, curious students that sometimes wander through, but he’s turned on the soft, warm lights in his office and at the big, mahogany table so that once Clarke passes the first few shelves that are quietly collecting dust, she’s met with the familiar sight of Monty. He’s bent over a large tome, one of Kane’s huge collection that makes up the rest of the library. 

From his years serving on the Watcher’s Council and his more recent years as Clarke’s Independent Watcher, Kane has amassed a huge number of books. His collection is mostly made up of Watcher diaries and copies of Council files and records; ancient tomes of demon and vampire lore; yet untranslated texts in lost languages and obscure demon dialects; records of moon cycles from the past several thousand years and lists of demon festival days and known massacres… just to name a few, as he likes to say.

Kane always complains about their limited resources but even having to read some of the introductions to the basic demon encyclopedias leaves Clarke with a headache and a burning desire to be reading anything else that doesn’t have long, smugly self-congratulatory descriptions written in Watcher jargon.

So, honestly, thank god for Monty, who spends more and more of his free time with Kane these days, helping him research any strange demons Clarke comes across. When Clarke drops her bag on the chair next to him and looks over his shoulder, it seems like the text he’s working on is primarily in Latin. Clarke’s eyes glaze over almost immediately

“Hey, Clarke,” Monty says, not bothering to look up at her. He pushes a mug of tea toward her, half empty and luke warm when she touches it. She turns towards the little electric kettle Kane keeps right outside his office and refills his cup for him.

“Translating?” Clarke asks him as she hands it back to him. “Looks fun.”

Monty smiles at that and looks up at her. “It’s not so bad,” he says. “It’s a project Kane and I came up with. I’m trying to track linguistic patterns through old spells, see if we can’t adjust and adapt them into the vernacular.”

“Like I said, fun.” Clarke says dryly and flops down into her chair. “Why not just keep them in their original form?”

“We think that a lot of these older spells relied on the practitioner's understanding of nuances in the language in order to get a fully realized application of the spell. That’s why so many of the spells Raven and I have tried seem so limited: because we don’t understand the mulitiple meanings behind the words.”

“So you’re saying the old Latin speaking witches and magicians basically used puns and word play to get magic to do their will.”

“Ever seen Charmed?” Monty laughs. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“Well I, personally, can’t wait for you and Raven to come up with some cute little rhymes to send demons back to hell.”

“Who are we sending where?” Monty and Clarke look up the staircase of the library to where Lincoln is leaning on the railing. He looks tired and a little forlorn, as he always does, but he offers them a smile.

“Demons back to where they came from. Just your average adventure squad shenanigans,” Clarke assures Lincoln and see’s his mouth twitch further at that. “How was your night?”

Lincoln shakes his head. “Nothing much to report. I did go by Jasper’s…” he glances at Monty, who’s ducked his head and is staring hard at the tiny Latin scrawl, frowning.

“And?” Clarke prompts gently, placing her hand on Monty’s arm and squeezing him.

“He’s not great, Clarke. Didn’t want me there, but I got some food into him, got him into bed.”

“Thank you,” Clarke says softly. There’s the sick, familiar swelling of guilt that always comes with Jasper’s name these days: his flashing, desperate eyes; his attempt to hit Monty the last time they had seen him; Maya vanishing on the end of Clarke’s stake, her eyes wide and pleading, big and brown as they had been in her life.

“He didn’t try to stake you, did he?” Monty asks, voice hard as he looks back up at Lincoln.

“No. Well, a half hearted attempt with a wooden spoon. He was drunk,” Lincoln tries to comfort him as Monty grimaces and looks back down at his book. 

“He’ll come around,” Clarke tries to say, but sticks in her throat and comes out a little funny. Of all of them, she has the least right to say that. But Monty glances at her and smiles all the same.

“He will,” he reassures her. “He has to.”

“Yeah,” Clarke says, dragging up a smile to send back to him. Of all people, Monty deserves to be targeted by Jasper’s cold demeanor and cutting remarks the least. He had helped Jasper until the unthinkable happened. He shouldn’t be comforting Clarke now and she feels another, terrible wave of grief and fear rising in her chest, primed and ready from her nightmares the night before. She wrestles it back down, hoping her face doesn’t show it.

“You sure you don’t want to help me?” Monty asks her, tapping his finger on the text as he studies her, eyes worried. 

“Thanks, but you know how I feel about Latin,” Clarke says, managing a smirk. It feels weak but it seems to do the trick.

“So a hard pass, then,” Monty laughs.

“Maybe if you actually were getting a degree in a relevant field, Latin might be a bit more accessible, Clarke.” Clarke rolls her eyes and looks up at Kane who’s stepped out of his office and is pouring himself a cup of tea. He smiles at her lightly, no bite behind his words. “How was your night?”

“Dull. I did my Astronomy homework in the cemetery until there was some minor slayage to be had. Astronomy is relevant right?”

Kane winces and looks painstakingly at the huge volume of very detailed astronomical observations he’s offered to let Clarke look through on multiple occasions. “I was thinking more Latin and Greek, some Anthropology.”

“Yeah, but I want to have friends,” Clarke says and Monty muffles his laughter into his hand. He’s studying engineering, a definitely cool major.

“Anything to report?” Kane asks, shaking his head as he sits down at the table with them. “Or are you just here to distract Monty from his project?”

“Just your typical Vamps looking to munch. I dusted all three of them, if that helps.”

Clarke fills him in and then promises to swing by in the afternoon if she has free time for training. She doesn’t mention Niylah and her free Thursday afternoons that Clarke has made a habit of busying.

She goes to class and then, as hoped for, she spends the afternoon in Niylah’s bed, a ray of sunlight warming Clarke’s face as she lazily eats Niylah out, tongue slow and firm on her clit, chasing Niylah’s sweet sounds, fingers working inside her.

She naps until the sun begins to set and then dodges Niylah’s invite for dinner in the dining hall together. 

“I would, but I promised some friends I’d catch up with them,” Clarke says as she pulls on her shirt and jeans. Niylah looks at her, eyes half closed.

“Always some excuse,” she says and Clarke feels bad as she leans over her to steal a kiss.

“Sorry, I just-”

“You don’t have to justify yourself, Clarke. We have fun. And if that’s all you want...”

“I don’t know what I want,” Clarke admits and toes on her shoes. “But I do know I want to see you later. Let’s get dinner some time, really. Just not tonight.”

“You tell me when,” Niylah says and rolls onto her stomach, still naked and luxuriating in the setting sun’s light as Clarke leaves her room silently. She takes a breath in the hallway outside and then makes for her own home.

Raven is still working and too caught up in her careful fiddling with screws to offer more than a wave when Clarke comes in. She drops her stuff and makes a quick sandwich for herself and one for Raven, which she leaves precariously balanced next to her on the top of a pile of old machine parts that take up the prime tv spots on the couch. 

“Want my hunting knife tonight?” Raven asks as Clarke comes back down from her room, decked out in dark colors and her stake tucked into her overlarge jacket pockets. “Just for some variety?”

“Thanks but I’m good. It’s been so quiet on the demon front lately I’m more likely to cut a hole in my jeans then cut anything’s head off.”

“And what a tragedy that would be,” Raven snarks and stretches in her chair. “Be safe,” she says out of habit and Clarke tugs on her ponytail. 

“I’ll try,” Clarke says and pulls up her hood.

The first leaves have just begun to fall and crunch softly under Clarke’s tennis shoes, the smell of autumn sharp in the chilled air, tickling Clarke’s nose. The graveyard is quiet when Clarke arrives but she takes a cursory walk around the the perimeter. There aren’t any fresh graves and with the moon not at a significant place in it’s cycle (thanks Astronomy), Clarke doesn’t expect a busy night. 

She scales the small Walace mausoleum and leans back against the roof, dangling her legs over the side as she unslings her small backpack. She’s got a good view of the graveyard from here as well as three of the surrounding streets and Clarke sets her book on her knees shrugs her hoodie closer and settles in.

Clarke’s not sure how long she sits on the cold granite of the mausoleum: long enough for a chill to seep into her legs through her dark stretchy jeans, for her hips to get a little stiff from sitting and Clarke’s stomach begin to growl from her limited dinner. She reads for a while and when she gets bored she tips her head back and stares up at the sky, finds the constellations in the sky her dad showed her when she was young. _Perseus, Andromeda, Cassiopeia_ and just below them _Pegasus._ Clarke stretches her hand up and traces lines through the points of light. The wind licks across her fingers and Clarke drops her hand and looks down from the sky, a hollow feeling in her chest. 

Movement in the street catches Clarke’s attention and she glances up to find a girl walking quickly, head bent low, hands tucked into her pockets. She looks like she doesn’t want to be seen and that’s what makes Clarke sit up and check her watch. It’s close to midnight, and the girl can’t be out of high school. Easy bait, if Clarke ever saw.

Clarke gets up, shoves her book into her backpack and makes the easy jump from the roof to land lightly on the grass. She steals silently across the graveyard, watching the dark head of the girl bent low as she walks. Clarke vaults the iron wrought fence and follows her, keeping far enough back that it’s not obvious. If any vampires are out looking for a meal, she’d rather not scare them off before they show themselves.

Clarke follows the girl through several streets headed towards the bustling downtown area of Arkville where all the clubs and late night coffee shops stay open late for college students and the teenagers with fake IDs. Arkville isn’t exactly known for it’s upstanding, safe party scene, mostly due to the large population of vampires and demons drawn by the hellmouth, but that never seems to discourage very many people.

It happens when the girl passes one of the dive bars. Clarke see’s a guy’s head swivel toward her, his body shift from where he’s leaning with a few others and he breaks off from chatting with them to call to the girl. She hesitates and Clarke slows, crosses the street to catch up with them but not give herself away by lingering too obviously.

“Hey, it’s not safe for a pretty girl like you to be out alone,” the guy’s saying as Clarke pauses on the pretence of tying her shoe across the street. “Come hang out with us.”

“Oh, no,” the girl demures, but Clarke can hear the soft undercurrent of interest in her voice. The guy’s good looking, soft eyes and dark hair, and his smile seems genuine. “I’m alright, I’m just meeting some friends a few streets over.”

“Let me walk you, then” the guy insists. “Don’t you know there are a ton of creeps out this late?”

“I don’t want to take you away from your friends,” the girl says again, but when Clarke glances up at them, she’s smiling, shy.

“Oh these guys? They won’t mind, we just started talking. Come on, let me walk you,” he cajoles and the girl scuffs her toe, wavering before she shrugs. 

“Alright. But don’t get any ideas,” she says primly. “Just as far as meeting up with my friends.”

“And no farther,” the guy promises and abandons his full beer bottle on the little wooden railing to join the girl on the sidewalk. “Lead the way.”

Clarke stands slowly as the girl laughs and blinks up at the guy tentatively before cocking her head in the direction she’d been headed. She tucks her hands into her pockets again and her pace is slower with her new companion. The way she smiles up at him is soft and Clarke sees the guy sway close to her, grinning as he says something Clarke doesn’t catch. 

They walk down the street before they turn onto a side street, and then another and Clarke grips her stake in her pocket. If he’s going to attack, it’s going to be soon, they’ve gotten away from the Main Street with all the patios and restaurants and sure enough, when they turn a corner ahead of her and Clarke hurries to catch up, they’re gone from the street when she turns onto it.

“Shit,” Clarke murmurs to herself and speeds up. There’s an opening to an alleyway on the right and Clarke can hear a soft scuffle happening. It’s grafitti’d and dark, just a narrow shaft of light coming from a blinking, grated yellow bulb that’s affixed high to the wall. The alley smells of stale trash and Clarke sighs. 

“What is it,” Clarke wonders aloud, stepping further into the alleyway, “about you vampires always choosing the grungiest places to grab a bite to eat? Is there anything wrong with the little ambiance of a well lit street?”

The scuffle goes quiet and then the guy stumbles into the shaft of light, a hand clapped to his neck, eyes wide with fear. Oh. Clarke sighs.

“Get out of here,” she tells the guy and he goes, stumbling, unnecessarily dramatic. “Alright, so you let him go. Why don’t you and I have a chat anyway?” Clarke asks the darkness and for a second nothing happens, but then the vampire steps out, face craggy and eyes yellow.

“Hello,” Clarke says pleasantly. “Usually when a stranger offers to walk you somewhere safely, the polite thing is to not try to eat him.” 

The vampire cocks her head at Clarke. “You’re not the boss of me,” she says snarkily and Clarke sighs.

“No, I’m not, but manners are never out of fashion,” Clarke says sweetly and the vampire snarls as she launches herself at Clarke.

She’s fast, Clarke will give her that. Unlike most vampires that throw themselves open mouthed at Clarke, this vampire actually uses her fists. Clarke blocks the one thrown at her face and her answering blow is dodged with surprising ease. Alright, Clarke thinks, baring her teeth, fair enough.

They’re roughly of the same height and build so Clarke can’t use the vampire’s weight against her. But still, even with this vampire’s fast reflexes and strength, Clarke has a little more finesse in her fighting. This vampire is feral and vicious, eyes a little frenzied as she claws at Clarke’s face. Clarke lets her feel like she’s got the advantage for a moment, lets herself falter and step back so that when the vampire springs, Clarke steps neatly out of the way and gives her an extra push to send her careening into the concrete wall. Clarke lunges after her as she staggers to regain her balance and wrestles her roughly down to the ground.

The vampire twists and tries to roll away from her, but Clarke scrambles after her and grabs her around the waist. She slams the vampire onto her back and grabs one of her wrists and pins it. Clarke swings herself to straddle the vampire and traps her other wrist when the vampire reaches up to claw at her, forces it under her knee.

“Let me go,” the vampire snarls and Clarke shakes her head, replacing her hand with her other knee, effectively pinning both of of the vampire’s arms by her sides, and bears her weight down on the vampire’s hips so she can’t buck Clarke off.

“Sorry,” she says, pulling her stake from her pocket, “that’s not part of the job description.”

Beneath her, the golden eyes and wrinkled face morph back into human form and Clarke stares down into large blue eyes of a young girl, not much older than sixteen. “Bell!” The girl shouts and Clarke has to fight against the sudden nausea rising in her throat, closes her eyes so she doesn’t have to watch herself stake a girl who was someone’s daughter, a girl who was loved by someone.

Her arm is halfway through it’s descent, aimed straight and true at the vampire’s heart, when a blow lands across the right side of Clarke’s face, rough and fast and strong enough that it knocks Clarke off balance and her stake goes wide, glancing off the vampire’s shoulder. Clarke’s head rings and before she can regain her balance she’s caught another violent cuff that sends her skidding off the vampire and into the alley wall. 

Clarke tastes blood and her vision is blurry for all of a single moment before she shakes her head and finds a large, hulking shape crouched between her and the half prone form of the vampire she had been sure was alone.

“You know,” a low voice growls. “Every place we find ourselves, seems some kid is playing at being a demon hunter these days. Must be trending.” The form straightens and steps forward into the sharp shaft of light and Clarke sees a tall man: dark messy curls falling into his face, hands half curled into fists but his posture laconic, bored. His eyes are hostile as he considers her and there’s a nasty twist to his lips when he raises an eyebrow, dismissive. “What do you think, O? Still hungry? She looks like she might make a half decent meal.”

“I think you’d find I’m a little tough to chew on,” Clarke says, standing back up. The right side of her jaw is just a little tender from where she‘s been hit but she feels the familiar rush of adrenaline, the quick healing in her body and she musters a smirk for the man’s benefit. “And while I’d be the last to knock a demon hunter, you’re way off base.”

“Is that so?” The man asks her. He keeps her in his line of vision as he half turns back to the vampire still on the ground and offers her his hand. She takes it and he pulls her up, barely glancing at her. “Well if you’re not a demon hunter, I’m afraid you’re in trouble, ‘cause you’ve got two on your hands to deal with now.”

“I’m not too worried. Being the Slayer prepares you for these things,” Clarke says cooly and shifts her grip on her stake. So the man- demon- in front of her is strong. Nothing she hasn’t dealt with before ten times over. He pauses at her words, cocks his head.

“Slayer?” He asks slowly, eyes suddenly intent on Clarke’s face.

“That’s right. As in Of Vampires. Alias: the Chosen One. Alias: The Light that Goes Bump in the Night, I can go on if I’m not ringing any bells, but I think you get the picture.”

“The Slayer,” the demon repeats, almost bitter, and shakes his head, a cruel smile twisting his mouth. He glances at the vampire next to him. She’s watching him hungrily, body tensed and low, ready to launch herself at Clarke again. 

“Come on, Bell,” she half pleads, half growls. “Let me kill her.”

“Yeah, come and let her try,” Clarke offers conversationally, waiting. The demon hasn’t moved toward her, but his posture has shifted, suddenly tense, suddenly guarded. “I’m guessing you might be having second thoughts though. Too bad I’m all in. Hazards of the job: keeping new friends is so difficult. But it’s been nice chatting.”

“Pleasure’s all ours,” The demon says but he takes a half step back, not turning tail, not running, not yet, but Clarke’s seen demons twice his size and attitude cower like frightened rabbits before the end. Slaying him and the vampire won’t be too hard. “Octavia,” he says quietly but with a low rumble of authority, “time for you to go.”

The vampire’s eyes snap and she rounds on the demon, eyes flashing yellow, face morphing dangerously and she hisses at him. The demon gives a harsh jerk of his chin, and his voice is commanding when he repeats himself. “Now.”

“Take all the fun out of fucking everything,” the vampire mutters as she turns on her heel and stalks huffily off into the darkness. Clarke tracks her with her eyes, half considers going after her but the demon in front of her shifts, testing her distraction and Clarke’s attention snaps back to him. 

“You know once I slay you, I’m going to slay her,” Clarke tells him, flipping her stake in her hand for show and the demon’s eyes follow the movement carefully.

“Stating a lot of conditionals as if they were absolutes there,” he rumbles, and Clarke watches as his hands flex, as his fingernails extend just slightly into sharp claws. “ _If_ you kill me, you _might_ be able to catch up with her and even then, you only _might_ be able to kill her.”

“Kill is such a strong word when you’re already dead,” Clarke says sweetly and then feints left and ducks right.

The move brings her close into the demon’s space, and she angles her stake up because a heart’s as good a guess as any for maximum hurt. Her strike is stopped in it’s arc by the demon’s forearm crashing painfully down against her own. He steps back, surprisingly quick and then swipes at her, open handed. Clarke just manages to duck, his claws whistling through the air right above her head, the breeze of them kissing her forehead.

She pops up close and elbows him hard in the sternum, hears his surprised huff of breath before he’s grabbed her arm and drags her backward and down to slam her against the concrete. Clarke grabs the collar of his shirt and vaults her legs up over her head, managing to twist and somersault free of him and catch herself on her feet. She’s got a split second opening where she aims her stake in for his neck, quietly berating herself for not taking Raven up on her offer of the hunting knife, before the demon’s whirled to face her, too near for her to effectively stake him, and he returns the elbow to her stomach. 

The fight is fast and dirty and mean, both of their measured breaths becoming ragged. The demon’s face has morphed, lines like jagged cuts opening along his cheeks and his eyes are so dark they’re close to black. When Clarke’s stake catches his arm, he bleeds blue.

Clarke’s eyes sting with sweat and there’s a stitch in her side because she hasn’t fought this hard in a while, but underneath that, underneath the grunts of exertion and parried blows and vicious near misses, a fierce, devastating joy blooms in Clarke’s chest. She doesn’t have room for quippy one-liners, doesn’t have the brain space to think of anything other than looking for openings, for weak points, tracking the demon’s movements and keeping her guard up. Her mind is quiet in a way she can’t remember it going in a long time.

Still, every second wasted here gives his vampire companion that much longer to get away. Clarke waits for her opening and then goes for his neck. 

It’s a quick move: Slayer speed and Slayer strength makes the execution of this particular neck break nearly unique to her and for all of this demon’s speed and strength, he’s not much more than an enhanced human. It should be a quick, clean ending for him, no blood. But the second her hand grazes his jaw and the other reaches for purchase on the back of his head, the demon drops his weight and disappears from between her hands. Clarke is left grasping at air and has to quickly counter balance to avoid the fist he swipes up her body towards her own throat. 

No demon as of yet had ever recognized that move for what it would lead to- a vicious, snapping twist that would break clean through the spinal cord. The demon’s eyes are furious as he redoubles his efforts. Clarke gets clawed in the side even as her stake cuts jagged and shallow across his chest. For all Clarke’s training, this demon challenges her. 

He’s slowing though, and he knows it. Clarke sees his eyes rake over her, watches his movements become calculated to afford him the most damage with the least amount of energy. He doesn’t give her as many openings, and Clarke gets annoyed, switches her stake lightning fast to her right hand and slashes quick and reckless at his heart. He catches her wrist, stake inches from his chest, claws biting into her skin. He slams his other fist punishing and deep into the joint of her shoulder as he gives her wrist a vicious tug. With a sickening pop, her shoulder dislocates and Clarke can’t help the breathless cry of pain even as she ram her knee up into the demon’s inner thigh. 

He releases her on a curse and staggers back. Clarke’s vision tunnels as she roughly jerks her shoulder back into it’s socket, blinking away the blinding spots of pain behind her eyes to find the demon crouched, watching her. They eye each other for a moment, each gasping for breath before the demon shakes his head. “Your watcher’s neglected your right side. You’re weaker there.” And in Clarke’s moment of surprise, he turns on his heel and vaults the chain link fence.

By the time Clarke gets herself over the fence, her shoulder twinging painfully, the dark shadows have swallowed him and her lone footsteps echo between the buildings. She makes a half hearted attempt to search the nearby alleyways, but all she finds is rotting garbage and a few skinny rats that squeak at her as she passes. It’s late, and Clarke’s shoulder grinds in her socket: she’s done a sloppy job of setting it and it hurts. The gashes on her side pull uncomfortably as they heal, her sleeve wet from blood at her wrist. 

“Goddamnit,” Clarke mutters, pocketing her stake and slowly turning for home. It’s been a while since anything’s gotten away from her and the unresolved adrenaline thrums unhappily in her veins, makes her feel sick and antsy. Coupled with her frustration it means she’s in a decidedly bad mood. Clarke replays the scuffle as she limps home.

 _Your watcher’s neglected your right side…_ Clarke grits her teeth, peeved, and then frowns. She’s never had a demon acknowledge her training before. It’s as unusual as it is annoying that he recognized the slight difference in skill between her dominant and nondominant sides. Fuck him, Clarke grimaces and grips the stake in her pocket tighter. 

Raven’s up when Clarke gets home. As she limps up the stairs, Raven calls to her and sticks her head out of her room, grinning until she catches sight of Clarke. “Oh shit. Ouch, Clarke.” She steps out in the hallway and stops Clarke so she can better see her. “Babe, your shoulder-”

“I know, I don’t think I got it right,” Clarke says through clenched teeth and lets Raven lead her into the bathroom where there’s better light. She takes a deep breath as Raven sets her hands on Clarke’s arm and when she nods, Raven gives it the right pressure and angle to pop it back fully into place. Clarke swears under her breath and lets Raven sit her on the edge of the bathtub as she pushes Clarke’s shirt up to look at the healing scratches.

“You slay it, at least? Whatever did this to you?” Raven asks, mouth thin and voice tight as she pours iodine out onto a clean cloth and carefully starts to wipe the dirt and grime from the scratches. 

Clarke shakes her head. “Ow, No. Not yet. The fucker got away. And the vampire.”

“Two of them?” Raven asks, glancing up at Clarke. “What happened?”

“Took me by surprise. I was about to dust her, he came out of nowhere. He was protecting her, I think.”

“That’s… new.” Raven says as she gets up to rummage for bandages in their medicine cabinet. 

“Right? Usually it’s every baddy out for himself.”

“Maybe they’re working together for some cult? You know demons love their cults.”

“Maybe,” Clarke says slowly. “Thanks,” she adds as Raven finishes wrapping her side and starts on her wrist. “God, I’m tired.”

“You need to get some rest,” Raven says, gently brushing the hair off Clarke’s forehead and Clarke ducks under her hand, trying to not to notice Raven’s mouth turning down, hurt. Her friend’s gentle touch is too much when she’s still wired with energy that wants to go towards killing something.

“Yeah. I know. You should sleep too,” Clarke offers by way of apology and knows it’s pretty lackluster but Raven just nods and steps back from Clarke.

“Take the morning off tomorrow,” Raven urges softly. “Sleep in and let your body heal. I know you’re the Slayer, Clarke, but you’re still human.”

“I’m fine,” Clarke assures her and manages to hide her wince as she stands. “Besides, Kane will probably want a full report.”

“Ok,” Raven murmurs and steps aside to let Clarke out of the bathroom. 

Clarke ignores the sharp pain in her shoulder as she strips her shirt over head and tosses it roughly toward the laundry basket. Between the blood and the tears it’s probably ruined but she liked that shirt a lot. Her room is half lit from the decorative string lights draped over her headboard and she realizes Raven must have turned them on for her while she was out. She feels a low twinge of guilt but can’t bring herself to go seek out Raven again. She feels so empty, a yawning pit in her chest that always seems to catch up with Clarke at the end of the night after patrol. Her head buzzes with the nasty, soft sneer of disgust in her inability to slay the demon and vampire, making her feel nauseous even as she knows that once she has, that empty, sick feeling will grow just a bit deeper still. It always does. 

When she crawls into bed, the faint rosy light and play of shadows across her hands makes Clarke think of blood and death and she jerks the plug out of the socket. Her room goes dark.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A HUGE thank you to everyone who left comments and kudos (and hit up my askbox) on the last chapter! Always makes my day to hear what you guys are thinking and feeling. 
> 
> And thanks to my beta cetaprincipessa, as well as raincityruckus for their insightful feedback.

Clarke sleeps poorly.

Her nightmares aren’t limited to her father and Wells and the sickly sweet perfume of lilacs in her nose she will always associate with that night in early May. She’s dreamt of Finn- no blood with that one, luckily, but he’s lurked in the blurry edges of consciousness, howling: lonely and impossible to reach. She’s dreamt of the test on her eighteenth birthday going horribly wrong and Kane dying as Clarke, still drugged and weak, watches him murdered by a demon at the hands of the Council.

Now, she dreams of dark alley ways and a voice growling _your watcher_ , and then the demon with dark eyes and curly hair tearing her arm from her body, ripping her heart out and watching her die. She wakes up when the light is just beginning to go golden and pink and blue in the sky and lies a long time staring at her ceiling, not really thinking about anything, just watching the shadows of her slanted ceiling recede, trying to convince herself what waits for her on the other side of this day has to be better. 

She waits until she hears Raven go down stairs, then waits a little bit longer to give her friend the impression of having slept through the night. When she finally manages to sit up and put her feet on the floor, she finds a cute dress in her closet and pulls on tights and does her hair. When she looks at her reflection, the bags under her eyes are too deep to pull off the Chipper Slayer look she’s going for. She does her makeup and practices a smile in the mirror before she goes down to join Raven in the kitchen.

“Hey!” She greets her brightly and curls her arms around Raven’s middle to give her a squeeze from behind. “That smells good.”

“It should,” Raven says, twisting to get a good look at Clarke. “How’s your shoulder?”

“Much better. Thanks for resetting it.” Clarke gives her a peck on the cheek and pours Raven orange juice, puts on Raven’s favorite station so that she smiles at Clarke. “I’m out- gotta see Kane and check in.”

“You don’t want breakfast?” Raven calls after Clarke and she bobs her head back into the kitchen. 

“Oh, um. No time. But come by campus and we’ll have lunch?” Clarke waits for Raven’s nod before she gives her a grin and grabs her bag. 

Kane is at the main table, drinking tea and flipping through the morning news when Clarke pulls open the heavy door and her footsteps echo in the hush of the stacks. He looks up and gives her a pleasant smile. “Morning, Clarke. You’re up early.”

“And I see you’re already catching up on World News. Anything foreshadowing the next impending apocalypse?”

“Luckily, no,” Kane says. “But there’s a good article about Nasa’s new technology. Did you know that-”

“You kind of wish there was, don’t you? An impending apocalypse.” Clarke continues as she sets her bag down and steals a sip of his tea. 

“Clarke,” Kane scolds her but there’s no bite to it. “And of course not.”

“You want something to research though,” Clarke decides and Kane rolls his eyes in exasperation. 

“I take it, with these questions, that you might have something for me to look into?” Kane folds his newspaper with a last, lingering glance at his article and gives her his attention.

“Maybe,” Clarke admits and then glances up into the dark rows and shelves of books. “Is Lincoln here?”

There’s a soft thump of Lincoln dropping to the floor from the perch he’s made in the back and he appears quietly from the shadows, giving Clarke a mild smile as he pulls out a chair and joins them. “Something come up on patrol?”

“Two somethings,” Clarke says and props her chin in her hands. “I had a vamp all set to be a stake cushion and then out of nowhere this demon appears. Have you ever heard of that? Demons rescuing vampires?”

Lincoln cocks his head. “Were there-”

“Cult or religious ties?” Clarke asks dryly. “No, Raven wondered about that too, but it was just the two of them, as far as I could tell.”

“I’ve never heard of a demon partnering with any of my kind without a unifying cause. Are you sure the demon wasn’t working for the vampire? Some subservient breed?”

“Very,” Clarke says, tracing the wood grain of the table with her finger. “Not the way he fought or with his attitude. He made the vampire leave when he figured out who I was. Also,” she glances at Kane, her dream suddenly sharp behind her eyes. “He knew I had a Watcher.”

Kane reads the worry in her face and shakes his head gently. “A lot of demons study Slayer lore the way we study demon lore, Clarke. It’s nothing to worry about unnecessarily. What exactly did he say?”

“He made some crack about my right side being weaker,” Clarke grumbles.

“He probably just said it to rile you up, you know demons like to run their mouths,” Lincoln offers, “Why are you letting this bother you more than anything else a demon’s said to you in a fight?”

“Because he’s right!” Clarke snaps, frustrated. “There’s not a huge difference, but it’s there. And he noticed.”

She sees Kane and Lincoln exchange a look and Clarke bites her lip against the annoyance rising in her chest. “Kane,” she says, voice cool. “He was good. He’s strong and fast and smart. I need to know what I’m going up against.”

“We’ll look into it,” Kane soothes her. “What can you tell me about the demon?”

Clarke recounts the demon’s sharp claws, the way grooves along his face opened when he fought, the way he bled blue. Kane makes a few notes in the corner of his newspaper. “Dates, plans, the usual demon rambling?”

“No grand scheming but… the vampire called the demon ‘Bell’, I think. And he called her ‘O’ and ‘Octavia’.”

If she didn’t know Kane as well as she did, she would have missed the way he sat a little straighter, the way his mouth thinned and disappeared into his beard. “What?” Clarke asks him. 

“The vampire, how old did she look?”

Clarke thinks of the girl she had seen, small and delicate with her head ducked low. “She pretty much nailed the PYT vibe. I wouldn’t put her over 17.”

Kane looks at her for a long moment and then scrapes his chair back and tosses his newspaper on the table. 

“Kane?” Clarke calls after him as he turns to go into his small office. He doesn’t answer her but there’s the crash and tumble of books being disrupted from stacks and Kane’s quiet curse. Clarke glances at Lincoln and rolls her eyes at his raised eyebrow. Kane has a flair for the dramatic now and then, sometimes it’s best to indulge him.

Kane reappears with a bound leather notebook and a manila folder in hand. He flips through the notebook and then unclips a picture from a page and slides it across the table to Clarke. “Is that her?”

It’s a photo of a young girl: long dark hair and blue eyes, a stubborn jut of her chin and a confrontational cock to her head. Despite the obvious attitude, she still looks tremendously young and there’s a light to her face, yet undimmed, that speaks to a belief of her own invulnerability. Clarke recognizes the expression, but not the feeling that accompanies it.

“That’s her,” Clarke says quietly and flips the photo over. On the back, someone’s neat handwriting has recorded: _Octavia Blake, Potential._

She raises her eyebrows at Kane, but he just passes her another photo, pulled from the manila folder. “And him?”

This one’s of a young man with tan skin and a sea of freckles. Much like Octavia Blake, his gaze is challenging and the clench of his angular jaw suggests a degree of danger. It’s a few years out of date, but it is undoubtedly the demon Clarke fought the night before. Clarke looks up at Kane. “Who is he?”

“Bellamy Blake,” Kane says tossing the folder on the table and dropping down in his chair. “Octavia Blake’s older brother.”

Clarke puts the picture down on the table so that Blake stares up at her with the same dark eyes that considered her the night before. She folds her hands in her lap and leans back in her chair. “Want to fill us in?”

“The sad truth of it is that there isn’t much to tell. Octavia Blake was located by the council as a Potential Slayer and her brother Bellamy was brought on and trained as her Watcher. As I understand it, the council received a report a few years later that Octavia had been killed. Bellamy was ordered to come in, but he disappeared. 

“He took,” Kane says, passing a hand over his face, “a huge number of Council diaries that he had been studying, as well as several very rare volumes of demonology.”

“And now he’s a demon,” Clarke concludes. “And Octavia’s not just dead: she’s a vampire.”

“Something that the council, in their infinite wisdom, never made note of in their report.”

Lincoln reaches across the table to take the picture of Octavia and study it. “The council never followed up on her death? Seems surprisingly lax given that one of their Potentials was killed.”

Kane shrugs. “I believe at the time the council was dealing with some internal issues.”

“That sounds not at all surprising,” Clarke mutters and holds up her hands when Kane shoots her a look across the table.

“What matters now is how we proceed. I do know that once the council got itself together, they put out a warrant for Blake. They’re quite eager to retrieve the books he stole. Proper protocol at this point in time would be to notify them that he’s here.”

Clarke thinks of the silent, suited men and women who she had last seen when she turned her back on them, the drugs in her system making her unsteady on her feet, their betrayal burning dark in her chest. “Doesn’t breaking from the council mean we don’t have to follow protocol?

“This situation is more complicated than I would like,” Kane admits. “As a former Watcher in Training, Blake knows more of how things work with the council, how things work with a Slayer, than your average demon should. And if he’s still with Octavia…”

“Doesn’t change what I have to do,” Clarke says, looking down at her hands as they clench in her lap. “A demon’s a demon; vampire’s a vampire. Why notify the council when ultimately the end result’s the same? And no one’s more qualified in slaying than I am.”

“Well yes, but-”

“They’ve cut you off from all their resources and manuscripts,” Clarke reminds him. Kane’s mouth twitches, half amused, half annoyed, fully aware of what Clarke’s trying to pull. “If I take Blake out, we get all the information he still has. Come on, Kane. Rare books about Demonology? When was the last time you got yourself anything nice?”

Kane considers her for a long moment and then shakes his head, resigned. “Fine. But we proceed with caution on this, alright? Blake was only twenty-two when he went on the run: he’s smart and resourceful and I don’t want you engaging with him again until I’ve got everything straight. Clarke?” Clarke looks up from staring at the worn picture of Bellamy Blake in front of her. “Ok?” Kane prompts.

“Hold the slayage until we come up with a game plan. I hear you,” Clarke says and refuses to look back down at the picture of the boy who was only a year older than she is now when he, too, defied the council. For all the glowering in his photo, there’s a question in his eyes, a concern, and Clarke can’t look at it anymore because soon she’s going to drive the remaining light from those eyes and it’ll just be another day. She turns the picture over so that the sunlight stops reflecting off the shiny surface of the photo finish.

 _He’s just a demon_ , she reminds herself. Even if he once was human, he’d made a choice, he deserved mercy even less than the vampires she dusted on the daily. He’d chosen darkness and she was the answering punishment from the light. 

She pushes the photo back across the table to Kane. “So when do we get started on The Research?”

“Now,” Kane says as he tucks the photograph back into the folder. “There are only so many breeds of demons that have blood that remains blue when exposed to oxygen. I should be able to narrow it down. And... Lincoln?”

“I’ll see if I can get a read on where they are, if they’ve stayed in town since last night,” Lincoln says. “Do the usual digging, hit up the local demon spots.”

“You’re an absolute angel,” Clarke says dryly and Lincoln smirks at her. 

“You know me, servant of the light. If you need me,” he says standing, “I’ll be slumming it.”

“Be safe,” Clarke tells him and Lincoln’s smile softens. 

“Don’t worry, I will be.”

Lincoln disappears back into the shadowed shelves of books and Clarke hears the floor grate clink quietly as he drops down into the deep crawl space that leads to the basement and then the sewers. Kane is watching Clarke when she looks at him again and she offers him one of her finer peppy smiles.

He ignores the smile. “On a scale of A Lot to Entirely, how much are you beating yourself up right now?”

Clarke grimaces and leans her head back against the chair rail to stare up at the ceiling rafters. “I was so close, Kane. I almost had her.”

“Clarke,” Kane says, voice gentle. “Just because she got away this time doesn’t mean she will next time. You know this: not every fight ends in a victory.”

“Can’t they though?” Clarke asks and he chuckles at that. “Kane,” Clarke starts, frowning. “If the council didn’t know about me as a Potential, does that mean I was weaker than other Potentials before… you know, I Became The Slayer,” Clarke says with air quotes, still not looking up at her Watcher.

“Absolutely not,” Kane says firmly. “The way the council identifies Potentials is entirely random. Sometimes the council will invest years and years in a promising girl’s training only for her never to become the Slayer, and other times, like you, the Slayer is a girl they’ve overlooked.”

“Would have been nice, though,” Clarke muses, tamping down the waver in her voice. “If I had gotten that training. If I had-”

“Stop.” Kane leans across the table and taps Clarke’s knee so that she rolls her head to look at him. “We’ve been over this. As a Potential, it’s unlikely you could have stopped them getting turned even with training.”

“You don’t know that,” Clarke mutters. “Maybe I could have. Maybe I could have seen the signs, noticed something was up. Maybe-”

“What happened to your father and Wells was random and meaningless. And it’s not your fault. Please, Clarke,” Kane says. “I know that this loss was devastating. But it wasn’t on you.”

Clarke holds his gaze for a long moment before she nods and drops her eyes. “I know,” she finally agrees, the words feeling empty in her mouth. “I just think about it sometimes, if things could have been different.”

“It was your dad and your best friend, of course you do,” Kane assures her. “But that’s why you’re the Slayer you are: you care. Your empathy for the people who can’t defend themselves the way you can sets you apart. You know that, don’t you?”

Clarke nods but can’t find the words to answer him. She offers him a small smile instead and Kane returns it this time, eyes warm. “You finish your homework?” He asks her and Clarke groans as she covers her face. “That’s what I thought. Keep me company while I research.”

“Fine, fine,” Clarke grumbles, wiggling out of her slouch and pulling her book out of her bag, slumping forward on the table. “Remind me why I have to be in college when I already have a full time profession?”

“Because,” Kane reminds her, smiling to himself as he gets up to retrieve one of his more extensive and dry demonology references. “You want real career options after you graduate.”

Clarke bites back the _if_ hovering on her tongue, Kane’s warmth and fatherly affection too comforting to dash by seeing the flicker of pain behind his eyes. Clarke knows sooner or later she’ll end up with a demon’s hand through her chest or a vampire’s teeth sunk into her neck: she’s come to grips with it. Kane and Raven, Monty and even Lincoln always get oddly hushed when Clarke mentions it, the reality of her death is foreign to them. Even these people, who fight and slay alongside her, who see death and carnage as often as she does, don’t understand that she’s a clock ticking down to a final, permanent end. It’s a Slayer’s fate to die young, it’s her friends’ fate to mourn. 

Kane comes back from his office not only with his reference book but a half finished cruller pastry that he offers to Clarke with a knowing look. Clarke can’t resist it, and grins at Kane. “So much for sticking to that strict Slayer diet.”

“I think the Slayer deserves something nice for breakfast after she’s had a rough night.” 

When Kane had first arrived with slicked back hair and cold eyes, and informed her of what she was in his superior, detached manner, Clarke never thought she would like him. Now, when her guilt won’t let her meet her own mother’s eyes, when Clarke being the Slayer cost Abby her easy, happy family life, Kane is her rock. His hard-ass, rule toting ways have softened the longer he’s known Clarke. The clipped orders and Council mandated exercise and diet regime have been replaced by Kane’s genuine encouragement and guidance. Even Raven, whose chosen life path brings her closer than anyone to sharing Clarke’s experiences, doesn’t always see through Clarke’s perky facade the way Kane does. 

The pastry is flaky and rich when Clarke nibbles on it and it reminds her she had nothing more than a sandwich for dinner the night before. She takes a big bite of it and ignores Kane’s amused chuckle. She has to read and retain four chapters of Wuthering Heights for her ten am class and she gets through most of it before Kane kicks her out of the library in time for her to walk across campus to the main academic building. 

Monty’s sitting on the steps with a pretty girl Clarke vaguely recognizes as one of his friends and he gives Clarke a small wave. They chat a few more minutes before Clarke has to excuse herself for class, promising Monty to meet him for lunch.

Clarke manages to contribute just enough at the beginning of the discussion to slide through the rest of it not paying attention and when it’s over, heads to the quad outside the dining hall. Raven is sitting under a shady tree, her leg stretched out in front of her and a pair of large, stylish sunglass perched on her head. There are a few senior boys eyeing her and she’s clearly having fun ignoring them. 

“Got some admirers,” Clarke comments and Raven shrugs.

“Even with my leg I could take any of them out. I’m out of their league,” Raven says airily. “How was class?”

“Probably interesting.” Clarke shrugs out of her backpack and leans back into the grass to enjoy the sun. “Kane had some interesting details about our friends from last night.”

Clarke fills her and Monty in when he flops down next to them with a tray from the dining hall. Raven steals his fries while she listens to Clarke, frowning. When Monty hands Clarke an apple, she eats it half heartedly. 

“Jesus,” Raven finally says. “I don’t get it though, why would Blake become a demon?”

“Maybe just because he could,” Monty says thoughtfully. “People do crazy things for power. And if he saw how strong his sister was as a vampire, maybe he wanted that strength for himself as well.”

“True. Well he wouldn’t be the first to use well intentioned information for evil purposes. Kind of a big step to go from Council trainee to murdery demon, though.”

“Actually,” Clarke mutters. “Not the biggest step if it’s the council I know.”

“Fair point,” Monty concedes. “Does Kane know how we slay him yet?”

Clarke checks her phone: no texts or missed calls, and she shakes her head. “We could always go help him research. He’d probably appreciate the company.”

“Old dusty books on a sunny day like this?” Raven grumbles. “Yeah, that sounds exactly like how I want to spend my time.” But it’s good natured complaining and Clarke and Monty both know it. Monty wraps up his sandwich as Clarke gives Raven her hands to help pull her to her feet. 

Kane’s exactly where Clarke left him, and if there weren’t ten new books open and arranged in an array around him Clarke would swear he hadn’t moved. He looks up blearily when Clarke, Monty and Raven troop in and he blinks for a second like all he can see is tiny lines of Watcher scrawl.

“Oh good, you’re all here.” He stretches and winces like he hasn’t moved in a while and Clarke goes to put on the electric kettle for him. 

“Any luck?”

“I think so,” Kane says. “Most demons have specific features and identifiable markers even when they aren’t using their powers. The ones that only reveal themselves in a fight are rare but… my best guess is that Blake turned himself into a Praesanim Demon.”

Raven wrinkles her nose. “Never heard of that one before.”

“They’re an old breed and not all that common. First appeared in Roman texts and has all the features Clarke described: appear human until their faces lesion in a fight to help ventilate heat since they burn hot, blue blood and sharp claws for defense.”

“How do we kill them?”

“They’re robust demons. They’ve got the basic weakness of beheading, severed spines and pierced hearts, but beyond that, little hurts them. Fire proof, from what most sources say, and like vampires, they have no natural life span.”

“For someone who wanted strength and power, it’s not a bad choice,” Monty offers. “Hard to argue with immortality.”

“Immortal until something bigger and badder takes them out,” Raven qualifies.

“Good thing I’m both,” Clarke mutters. “Just gotta figure out where he and Octavia are. Lincoln’s not back yet, is he?”

“I am,” Lincoln says, arriving through the back of the library with the impeccable and mysterious timing he always has. 

Clarke offers him a small, relieved smile. “Any luck?”

“On where they’re staying? No,” Lincoln says as he pulls out a chair and sits down. There’s some black blood on his knuckles that he notices and wipes away on his pants. “But apparently your demon was poking around some of the usual spots last night, asking questions.”

“What was he looking for?” Monty asks.

“The vampire with the soul,” Lincoln says quietly. “Me.”

“Well that’s going to make tracking him down a hell of a lot easier,” Raven mutters, leaning back on the table. “Just for shits and giggles or did he admit to wanting something from you?”

“From what I’ve heard, he wasn’t exactly looking to make friends, a good number of demons are laying low since he came through.”

“Sounds right. He seemed like a ‘hit first, share later’ sort of guy,” Clarke muses and absently touches her cheek where she had felt Blake’s fist the night before. “He’ll turn up if he’s trying to find you. If you guys can cover my patrol, Kane and I will stake out the warehouse.”

“I should be there with you,” Lincoln says but Clarke shakes her head. 

“I need you with Monty and Raven, just in case he’s out looking to hunt with Octavia. What’s the expression? Don’t put your Slayer and friendly vampire all in one basket?”

“We’ll keep in contact with radio,” Kane says, passing one to Raven who clips it to her belt. “Two clicks across the open line to signal he’s shown up.”

They spend another half an hour laying a rough plan down for the evening. They’ve learned time and time again that specific plans never line up the way they’re supposed to. Jasper could attest to that, Clarke thinks grimly. When Monty and Clarke have to head out to class, Raven stays to help Kane pack away his books. Lincoln stands and stretches as well. 

“If you’re kicking me out of my home tonight, I might as well get some sleep while I can,” he ribs Clarke.

“Don’t talk to me about sleep,” Clarke mutters but grasps Lincoln’s hand all the same.

“Try not to fall asleep in class,” he advises her with a smirk.

“Well now you’ve jinxed me,” Clarke complains. “There’s no way I won’t.”

She does manage to stay awake, but mostly focuses on the soft tap of feet in the classroom, the shifting of bored students, the scratch of graphite on spiral bound notebook paper. She feels itchy in her own skin, the adrenaline from the night before seeping back into her veins. Part of it is concern for Lincoln, she rationalizes. If they underestimate Blake and he finds Lincoln before nightfall, then Lincoln’s left to his own devices. To be fair, Clarke tells herself, being a hundred-something year old vampire does prepare you in many ways for dealing with a… Clarke frowns. She doesn’t know how old Octavia and her brother are. Can’t be all that old. Octavia’s clothes in her photo were recognizably trendy. 

Still, however young, Clarke worries. And under the worry, a vicious, dark thudding _want_ curls in her chest. She refuses to acknowledge it, doodles in the margins of her notebook instead, flowers and vines, innocuous designs that when she loses focus end up wrapped around battle axes and stakes. Clarke has to put down her pencil and actually focus on the lecture in the end, when her own thoughts can’t drown the hunger reverberating through her body for a fight. 

She and Raven split a cold pasta salad when Clarke goes home to change. Raven doesn’t let her leave without first boosting herself up on the kitchen counter and braiding Clarke’s hair up in a wreathed braid around her head. “Just to make sure it’s out of the way,” she tells her. 

Clarke lets her and ignores the soft fingers against her scalp. It makes her skin crawl, just a bit, being touched gently like this. 

Lincoln lives in an old, abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Arkville. It’s pretty cliched, as Vampire nests go, but Lincoln’s done a nice job of making the space habitable. Clarke would call it livable, but even Lincoln scoffs at that. He’s got creature comforts set up in one the old large administrative offices: a fridge to keep his blood, and a old, boxy television. He’s hung up the stringed lights Clarke bought him hung up around pillars and coiled around metal rafter beams. There are a couple shag rugs from the ‘sixties that Clarke’s spent afternoons scrunching her toes in spread out across the floor to keep away the draft. The windows are blacked out, of course, but Lincoln’s found vintage travel posters so the grey, concrete walls are decked out in hues of blues and yellows with tantalizing phrases such as “V _isit the Seashore!_ ” in faded, sans serif script to lighten the mood. Clarke likes his home. 

“They might not show,” Clarke says as she deals a hand of rummy and Kane lifts an eyebrow at her. They’ve been through two games now and he’s won both. Clarke isn’t great at rummy. She kills at Go Fish though.

“Maybe,” Kane agrees. He’s resting his elbow on his bent knee, leaning back against the couch. He watches Clarke over his cards, considering. “It’s early yet though.”

They get through two more hands and Clarke is winning the third, gleeful in spite of herself when there’s the soft whine of one of the big metal doors being opened below. Clarke glances at Kane as she drops her hand and finds her stake next to her. Kane’s already crouched low on his feet and they creep out of the room to the little balcony walkway that overlooks the wide, empty expanse of the first floor.

When Clarke peeks over the cement, she can just make out a tall figure standing in the doorway, backlit from a street light outside. The lean bulk of him and the careful, calculated way he takes a step further inside makes Clarke think it’s undoubtedly Blake. She drops back down and gives Kane a nod as she clicks the radio in her belt twice, their agreed upon signal. There’s a moment before she hears the muted chirps back from Raven. 

Kane meets her eyes and gives her an encouraging, calm smile before he moves down the wall away from Clarke, headed for the roost where he can perch and have better aim with his crossbow. Clarke closes her eyes for a moment, tries to find the quiet Kane always insists she’s capable of tapping into before a fight, but as usual finds only static energy. 

When she checks over the balcony again, Blake is just a bit further inside and is turning his head slowly back and forth, as if listening. As Clarke watches, he turns back to the door. “Alright O,” he says, not bothering to keep his voice low. “Come on in.”

“Is he here?” Clarke hears Octavia ask as she appears in the doorway, slight but moving with confident saunter. 

“I don’t know.” Clarke watches as he cocks his head again. “Someone is though.” And then louder, “Hey!”

It’s as good a cue as any, and Clarke bounces to her feet, knows that both of their superhuman vision should reveal her well enough even in the dark. “Don’t you know it’s rude to turn up without a housewarming gift?”

From his perch, Kane hits the switch that floods the ground floor in light and Clarke see’s Blake’s unimpressed glare. He squints in the light but doesn’t give anything else away as Octavia drops into a crouch next to him. She hasn’t vamped out, from what Clarke can see, but her eyes are bright and alert. There’s a certain glow vampires get when they’ve eaten recently, and Octavia has it. 

“Don’t _you_ know,” Blake wonders, hands shoved into his pockets. “That showing up without an invitation is starting to make you look desperate?”

“But I was invited,” Clarke says sweetly, then vaults herself over the ledge and drops to the floor across from them. “Where are the council diaries, Blake?”

Octavia snarls and her face shifts, eyes going golden and preditorial. “Wait,” Blake tells her. “Where’s Lincoln?” He counters.

“He’s here,” Clarke lies easily. “What do you want with him?”

“Personal business,” Blake says. He’s considering her carefully, seems content to keep talking for now, but Octavia is clearly searching the darkness of the second floor, head cocked. “And no,” he adds, “that’s not an invitation for you to meddle further.”

“There,” Octavia suddenly snarls, eyes fixed on a point over Clarke’s right shoulder and Clarke realizes she’s spotted Kane. In a move too fast for Clarke to predict, Octavia launches herself at her as Blake barely crouches before he springs past Clarke. Clarke only just sees him leap toward the balcony with the same strength that took him over the chainlink fence the previous night, before Clarke meets Octavia’s lunge. She brings her elbow down on Octavia’s shoulder and her knee up into the vampire’s stomach to slow her. Octavia’s fangs just barely miss Clarke’s neck as the vampire grunts and shakes off the blows. 

She barely gives Clarke room to draw her arm back before she’s back up close, ducking to sweep Clarke’s legs out from under her with a vicious swipe of her own legs. Even as Clarke flips herself sideways over Octavia’s leg, the vampire follows her, catches Clarke’s right arm, still just ever so slightly sore from the night before and attempts to break her wrist. Clarke follows the movement instead of bracing, letting the twist of her arm throw her body rather than meet any resistance, and uses her weight and strength when she catches Octavia’s neck to drag her down to the floor. She has the advantage here, but even as she collects herself Octavia scrabbles away from her just far enough to kick sharply at her temple. 

As she throws up an arm to block the blow, Clarke realizes that Octavia is fighting with the knowledge of what Blake learned the night before. She’s not letting Clarke get enough distance to pull her stake out, to line up a strike. She’s focusing on Clarke’s right side. Clarke switches tactics, she rolls away from Octavia, invites her to chase after her, the same move that worked on Octavia the night before. Octavia barely hesitates and Clarke sees something like bloodlust spark in her eyes, less cool calculation. 

Clarke plays to that, hunches her shoulders as she sits up, grime and dirt on her palms, makes herself look afraid as she scoots her back into the wall. “Oh, don’t,” she tries on and is pleased with the tremor in her voice.

It works. Octavia’s smile is hungry and her body loses the sharp edge of attention it had held. 

“Scared, Slayer?” Octavia asks, voice still clear around her teeth. “I was too. It hurts at first, but don’t worry. It just keeps getting worse.”

Clarke waits for Octavia to come close before she frees her stake with a quick jerk from her pocket and kicks hard at Octavia, catching her knee and feeling the satisfying crunch of the kneecap shattering.

Octavia screams as she goes down and Clarke follows up with a kick to the ribs. Octavia’s body curls instinctively in on itself and Clarke grabs her by the hair, hauls her up so she can stake her. They only need Blake for information.

“Hey!” A sharp voice barks and Clarke looks up at the balcony. Blake has an arm around Kane’s neck, keeping him in a tight choke hold and gripping one of Kane’s own whittled arrows, Blake’s arm poised and braced to drive it down into her Watcher’s heart. “Don’t,” he snarls.

Clarke realizes her breath is coming fast, adrenaline rushing through her body and Octavia’s wet, pained pants fill the space. Clarke hauls Octavia up against her, keeps a hand in her hair to restrict any movement and watches something a lot like panic flare in Blake’s eyes when she presses the sharp end of the stake into the skin above Octavia’s heart. She steadies herself and pushes down the cold fear for Kane. 

“You don’t want me to slay her? Let him go.”

Blake’s mouth is an angry, thin line and Clarke thinks his eyes might be a little wild as he considers her, then he roughly pushes Kane away from him, giving him an extra little shove to unbalance him and knock him off the balcony.

“Kane!” Clarke shouts, terrified as her Watcher plummets to the concrete floor. He lands hard on his shoulder, head thankfully missing the floor and Clarke strugges to breath as Kane gasps, breath knocked out of him. As he struggles to sit up, Blake leaps down after him and presses his foot into Kane’s neck, pushing him back down.

“I should have phrased that differently,” Blake growls at Clarke. “Let Octavia go, or I kill him. He’s your watcher, isn’t he? Certainly fights like one.”

Clarke feels panic rising in her chest but she pushes it back down. As long as she has Octavia, she knows on a fundamental level Blake won’t kill Kane. “I feel like you both missed the basic concept of a Vampire Slayer. I don’t let vampires go. Or demons, for that matter.” Clarke manages. Blake stares at her hard, and then applies more pressure to the sideof Kane’s neck, making him scrabble at the pressure on his windpipe. Clarke can’t help the way she flinches and Blake raises an eyebrow.

“I won’t repeat myself.”

“Why are you looking for Lincoln?” 

“Don’t test me,” Blake warns. “I will kill him and that will be on you.”

“If you do, I stake her,” Clarke counters. “You’re a bit too obvious to be smooth and mysterious. So while we’re here, tell me. What do you want from Lincoln?”

“Why do you care?” Blake snaps. 

“Because he’s my friend, as he happens to have a soul. Makes him a little less bite-y and a little more agreeable,” Clarke says as she tries to slow her mind, tries to think of a way to get Kane out of danger without letting either Blake or Octavia escape. “But you knew that,” she hedges. “You were asking about him.”

“You want me to start talking,” he laughs, cruel. “Slayer, I could talk sweet to you for days, but I will kill this man right here, right now if you don’t let my sister go.”

“Bellamy,” Octavia whimpers and when Clarke looks down at her, she realizes the vampire’s morphed back into human form. Her eyes are large and pleading as she stares at the demon. 

“Now!” Blake snaps, vicious again. “Let her go or I swear- Fuck!” he’s cut off by a sharp whistle and he flinches, clapping a hand to his neck. He growls and hastily jerks something out of his neck but it’s too late, his momentary distraction is all Kane needs to grab Blake’s ankle and knee and unbalance him in a rough leg grapple. Blake puts up a fight but his movements are already sluggish and weak, and as Lincoln bounds silently from the darkness of the warehouse, coming from the back entrance, Blake growls one last time before he’s on the ground. 

“Bell!” Octavia shouts and struggles against Clarke’s hold even as she cries out when she puts weight on her knee. “You bitch. What did you do? What-” another soft whistle and Octavia flinches as the tranq from Raven’s gun lodges in her thigh. She only manages a few more moments of weak flailing before she slumps in Clarke’s arms and Clarke lets her down onto the ground.

“Hey, you okay?” Clarke calls to Kane and he grunts, rubbing his neck and wincing as he tries to stand. 

“Just bruised, I think,” Kane wheezes. “You?”

“Fine,” Clarke says, only now realizing there’s an ache in her side from where she took the impact of her own fall. Lincoln’s binding Blake’s wrists: the demon is mostly gone, not alert enough to fight anymore but hazy eyes fixed on Clarke and Octavia across the floor.

Raven and Monty join them as well, Raven holstering her gun with a self satisfied smirk. “I told you infusing the tranquilizers with a Quieting spell would make them work faster,” she’s saying to Monty. 

Monty bends to help Lincoln lift Blake’s dead weight as Raven joins Clarke by Octavia’s side and crouches to look at her. “Want me to…” she offers, looking up at Clarke.

Clarke shakes her head. “She’s going to be the fastest way to get Blake to talk.” Clarke says, and helps Raven hoist her up with a grimace. “He’ll give us what we want if he thinks it’ll protect her.”

“Lot of loyalty for a demon,” Raven mutters. And then, “Come on, van’s out back. We should get them to Kane’s before the tranqs wear off.”

“Yeah,” Clarke agrees. Blake’s eyes have finally fallen closed, dark expression smoothed over, fight marks receding into his skin. She looks up at her friends. “Let’s go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come [hang with me on tumblr](http://verbam.tumblr.com)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thank you to @raincityruckus for her excellent beta work and to all the peeps who left comments, kudos and sent me uplifting messages on tumblr <3 Y'all are seriously amazing and keep me going.

Kane’s house is not the home of an underhelpful college librarian.

His house is large, one of those beautiful old bay and gable houses, painted a surprisingly cheerful blue with dark, steely trim; the whole house screams uninteresting bachelor. He's got his study and library, painted a tasteful, dull grey, home to a desk full of papers and gardening manuals. He's got a bright yellow kitchen with vintage vegetable drawings on the walls. His couch is lumpy in the living room and the dining room table is oak. Upstairs he has two guest rooms. If Clarke hadn't already known Kane the first time she saw his house, she would have dismissed him as exceptionally average.

Clarke’s spent endless hours here, late night studying with Kane in his big office; flopped over his couch when she's come down with an annoying head cold and complaining that Slayer powers should really mean she gets a pass from sinus congestion; having uncomfortably formal dinners with her mom at Kane's long table when Abby comes to visit. Abby and Kane get along reasonably well, which Clarke thinks she should be grateful for since they manage to carry a conversation between them when Clarke can't think of anything to say to her mom. 

Kane’s house is pleasant.

Excluding, of course, the lower level of Kane's house. How Kane intends to explain the three boxy, industrial steel rooms and the additional office that doubles as a surveillance room to realtors when he finally decides to sell this place, Clarke has no idea. As it stands, however, the basement is incredibly useful for situations like these: keeping demons and vampires they can't or won't yet slay. It hasn't happened all that often in Clarke’s time as the Slayer, but when they’re needed the rooms are even sturdier than they look. They had kept Maya there and, when Finn was still around, they made up a cosy little room in which to spend the full moon.

Clarke crouches in the back of the van when they pull into Kane's garage, balancing on her toes and absent mindedly flipping her stake in her hand in between the two inert Blakes. Lincoln hunches on the bench above Octavia, his big, expressive eyes studying Clarke even as he reaches down to keep Octavia's light frame from jolting too hard when the van goes over cobblestones. Monty’s up front with Kane and Raven calls up to them, ragging on Kane's driving. Clarke watches Blake for any sign of him waking, ready with another tranquilizer just in case he did manage to pull the first one free before it had given him enough of to keep him out.

“Alright,” Clarke says as the vans motor cuts out and her knees ache as they settle into stillness. “Let's go.”

The warm yellow light of Kane's garage overhead feels disconcerting as Monty opens the back doors and Clarke squints a bit. She hefts Octavia's small, light form over her shoulder and climbs out of the van, leaving Lincoln and Kane to handle Blake’s larger bulk. Clarke passes the bright green and pink lettering on the van of the fake gardening business that Kane uses as a cover, a number that dials to a perpetual busy signal. Clarke had once found it funny, but now the happy colors are just as grim as the yellow light of the garage. It could all be bleak blues and greys as far as Clarke is concerned. Her job is death, her gift to humanity is death: no need to put a pretty dressing on it.

Clarke trots down the stairs and hesitates for a moment to look back up the stairwell to Kane’s dark head as he appears in the sterile light at the top in the threshold of the basement stairs. “Where do you want her?” Clarke calls up to him.

“Last room down,” Kane decides and Clarke nods silently and makes the short walk down the hall. She leaves her propped against the wall, looking pale and much younger than sixteen. Clarke turns her back on her resolutely and pulls the door closed hard behind her, hearing the lock click with finality.

Lincoln is just disappearing into the room right at the bottom of the stairs, Blake’s black boots sticking out by his ribs and Clarke follows them in, leans against the doorway as Kane and Lincoln set the demon down on the floor. 

“No,” Clarke says quietly when Kane goes for the cuffs that would secure Blake to the floor. “The straps.” She nods her chin up to the heavy, shipping straps that hang from the corners of the ceiling, adjustable in height and, Clarke knows from experience, helpful with uncooperative demons. 

Kane glances up at her. “I'm not sure those are necessary, Clarke.” His voice is gentle and it makes Clarke bristle.

“He could have killed you, throwing you from that balcony. Besides, I don't want him thinking he’s here for a vacation. The straps are fine.”

Lincoln gets up and silently leaves the room, Clarke doesn't watch him go. Kane pauses for just a moment more and then reaches up and pulls the nearest strap down and loops it around Blake’s right wrist. Clarke crosses the room and does the same with the demon’s left hand. His skin is warm under Clarke's cool hand and she can feel the slow, drugged pulse in his wrist. She takes her hands away quickly and gives Kane a nod. He adjusts the height so that Blake’s arms are suspended overhead, his head hanging limply between them, his arms the only thing keeping him propped up.

Kane steps back and stands next to her, considers the demon and then Clarke feels his eyes on her face.

“What?”

“I'm alright, Clarke.” Kane's voice is still just as soft and it’s like he's consoling her. It makes Clarke's skin crawl. “I'm glad we've got Blake, but we don't need to punish him before we even begin.”

“We're not,” Clarke says coolly. “We're making sure he's not a threat any more. Punishment doesn't come into play.”

Kane's eyes stay on her face and Clarke has to turn away. “Come on,” she mutters. “We've got a while to wait.” Kane follows her out of the room and shuts the door behind him. He stops in his office to make sure the live feed is working, then Clarke troops up the stairs after him to the warmer house above. 

They find Raven and Monty in the kitchen, Raven perched on a counter, feet swinging, and one of them has turned on the kettle. Kane sits at the table and Clarke leans back against the wall, doesn't pull up her hoodie even though she wants to. 

“Where's Lincoln?” 

“Said he was getting some air,” Monty supplies as he digs through the cabinets for mugs. He stifles a yawn and Clarke glances at the clock on the wall. It's just past midnight but Clarke doesn't feel tired, despite her terrible sleep habits as of late, the adrenaline from the fight still in her blood and underneath that, the killing instinct simmering. She pushes it down and goes to get a cup of water, presses the cool glass to her cheek. 

“So what's our plan?” Raven asks, turning off the stove as the kettle begins to clatter and whistle. “Part A went off without a hitch, a rarity. When do we assume our luck’s going to run out?”

“I'm full steam ahead on the positivity train,” Clarke says. “I never say this, but we've got the upper hand. Vampire and Praesanim demon secured separately, good leverage for information, good research of slaying tactics… Clarke's a happy Slayer tonight.”

She helps Monty pour out the tea and takes a decaffeinated tea bag herself, slides Kane his usual herbal infusion and sighs. “It's just the waiting game now.”

“This never happens,” Monty says with a shake of his head, “but I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Does this mean we actually get to sleep tonight?”

“Looks like it,” Kane says. “Clarke, you, Raven and Monty should head home, get some rest.”

“Rest?” Raven laughs, “it's Friday night, there are parties to be had and cuties to mack on. What do you say, Clarke? Want to go see what we can find?”

Kane grimaces and Clarke manages a grin for Raven. “You guys go ahead. I'm going to stay here tonight. I'll crash in Kane's spare room.”

“I'll be fine, Clarke,” Kane says a little wearily. “Raven’s right, you should go have some fun.”

“Who's not having fun?” Clarke says. “I want to stay here tonight, ok?”

Kane looks at her again, careful, a little concern touching the edges of his eyes, but Clarke gives him her best innocent look and he concedes. “Of course. You know you're always welcome, Clarke.”

Monty and Raven stay long enough to finish their tea and Clarke agrees to text them in the morning with anything that comes up. Kane stays with Clarke in the kitchen a while, but Clarke can see his exhaustion, urges him to go to bed and eventually he pushes back his chair. 

“You will actually sleep, won't you?” He asks her. Clarke props her chin in her hand on the table and nods, fiddling with her tea tag.

“Yeah, I'm just winding down,” Clarke promises and Kane nods and gives her shoulder a squeeze. “Sweet Watcher dreams. I hope they’re of big dusty books and sharp stakes.”

“And obedient Slayers,” Kane laughs and leaves Clarke to his kitsch kitchen. Clarke waits until she can't hear the fall of his footsteps above her anymore and then swirls the tea at the bottom, of her mug and takes a long breath. She opens the little door that leads to Kane's perfectly landscaped backyard, (she still doesn't know when he found the time to plant the flower beds), and steps out onto the paving stones. The air has gotten chillier, crisper, and a low, moaning wind makes the dry leaves shuffle and whisper across the little walkway.

Clarke walks to the small garden bench and sits on the cold stone, tucks her hands into her hoodie pockets, “If you're annoyed with me,” she says to the dark, “might as well tell me about it.”

The wind quiets for a moment and then curls around her again as Lincoln drops down next to her, not quite managing to make Clarke startle with his presence like he used to. He looks at her and Clarke stares back.

“Go on,” she mutters finally. “How did I let you down this time?”

Lincoln shakes his head. “It's not that you're letting me down, Clarke. But you know how I feel about this.”

“Remind me which part,” Clarke snaps and puts her face in her hands. “The part where I kill demons and vampires because it's the only thing I'm good at and someone has to? Or is it the fact that I don't do it in a way you approve of any more?”

“Kane believes your empathy makes you different,” Lincoln says, his voice mild. “And when I met you, that was the case. You cared about people, Clarke. You let yourself feel the pain of those around you. I know it hurt, but Kane was right, it made you good.”

“What's your point? That I'm not miserable enough in my job for you anymore?”

Lincoln doesn't say anything and Clarke laughs. “God, your soul makes you so fucking preachy, Lincoln. I'm sorry I'm not having break downs on your approved schedule. I'm sorry I'm doing what I have to do to get through the day.”

“You've shut everyone out. You've shut me out, Clarke. I wouldn't worry if you were coping with this in a healthy way, but you aren’t even coping. It's turning you into someone you're not.”

“I put wooden stakes in demons that look like children about every other week. I cut off heads of monsters that beg me not to, and you know what? I don't complain. This is my life. This is all I will ever be, so how fucking dare you accuse me of being someone I'm not.” Clarke growls.

“If you just let Kane, Raven... anybody in. If you told them how isolated you felt, how unhappy-”

“I'd what? See how worried they are for me? See their pity? What is that going to do for me, Lincoln?”

Lincoln doesn't say anything for a long moment, he just looks at her and Clarke glares back at him and then gets up and pace. She glances up at Kane’s window to make sure his lights are off. When she looks back at Lincoln he's looking at his hands. “Please, tell me what you want.” Clarke prompts him, and is surprised how harsh her voice is. 

Lincoln looks up at her and his eyes are sad. Clarke snarls and turns away from him, but his soft voice still reaches her. “You're becoming cruel, Clarke. You're twisting yourself into something you aren't meant to be.”

Clarke has to stop herself from whirling on Lincoln. She's goes still instead and takes a careful breath. “You don't know me.”

“I used to,,” Lincoln says and Clarke hears how tired his voice is. “I just want to help.”

Clarke takes a deep breath and turns back to him, trying to see Lincoln as she first knew him, a gentle guide, kind to her, wise... someone who understood the darkness that crept at the corners of her soul because he had known Slayers before her, loved one, once, a long time ago when he was first cursed with his soul. 

When they had first met, Clarke had fought against that darkness inside her, had convinced herself there was something better to come, and all her pep, her humor and spirit had been real. As it’s slipped away, she’d fought hard to it cover up, but Lincoln sees it, sees the frayed and worn edges to her, the veneer that’s all she can manage over the dead thing that remains in her chest. And for all that she resents that he sees it, and how it makes her perfect act not-so-perfect, Clarke still loves Lincoln, the way she loves Kane and Raven and Monty: as much as she can in the increasingly limited places inside her heart.

“Sorry, I'm not that girl anymore. If you can't accept that, I’ll understand if you find a reason to leave,” she finally says, kicking the toe of her boot into the stone and feeling the reverberation up her leg.

Lincoln shakes his head. “I will be here as long as you are, Clarke.” 

Clarke thinks she's probably supposed to feel something with those words: maybe gratitude for Lincoln’s loyalty in the face of his doubt; maybe fear because Lincoln knows, like she does, that her time is limited; or maybe hope because she has someone to fight beside her until the end. But Clarke doesn't feel anything and when she looks up at Lincoln, she knows he sees that and his pitying expression makes Clarke turn away again.

“Thank you, Lincoln. You're a good friend, and I mean that.” Clarke tugs her fingers through her hair where it's starting to come loose from her braid. “You put up with a lot from me.”

“I don't need your thanks,” Lincoln tells her, not cruelly, but reminding her he's here of his own volition. “I wish I could help you. I wish you didn't feel like you needed to be so alone.”

“For them,” Clarke says, lifting her chin towards Kane's house, “I do. They aren't like you or me, they can't handle the reality of it. They think we all survive this, even after they saw what happened to Maya. They think I survive this, Lincoln, but it’s only a matter of time until a demon is faster and stronger than me. No one, not even Kane, is willing to accept that. How do you think they would react to the fact that I don't care anymore?”

“Maybe if you gave them a chance to listen to you, you’d find out. You're friends aren't weak Clarke. I think they’re capable of surprising you.”

“Maybe,” Clarke agrees hollowly. “But what's the point really?”

“Making the most of the life you have? Feeling like you don't have to pretend that it's not as bad as it is. You don't have to resign yourself to suffer, you may have years left yet; you may have longer.”

Clarke smiles a little at Lincoln. “You've just proved my point. I'm not looking for hope, and that's all any of you know how to give.”

“That's the point of having a soul,” Lincoln reminds her after a moment. “You are still capable of that if only you would try.”

“I’d rather they think I’m happy. I bear it so they don’t have to. It’ll be easier, that way, when I’m gone.”

Lincoln doesn’t say anything and Clarke sighs after a moment, closes the distance and sinks back down next to him on the bench. The silence stretches between them, Clarke staring at her hands, Lincoln waiting on her.

“I'm going to turn in,” she says after the silence stretches between them. “The fact that you're trying to help me is…” She doesn't know what to say to make it sound sincere and realizes Lincoln would hear through it anyway. So she says instead, “I don't deserve friends like you. Like any of you.”

Lincoln just looks at her and then shakes his head again. “Will you sleep tonight?”

Clarke shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe.” 

She gets up and is halfway back to the house when Lincoln calls after her, “If you can't, see if you can do more research on Praesanim.”

“Any reason?” Clarke asks, turning back to him and keeping her voice easy. 

Lincoln stands as well and flexes his shoulders. “Why would a vampire and a demon I know nothing about come looking for me?”

Clarke shrugs. “Boredom? Stupidity? Pick a reason, any reason?”

“How about hope?” Lincoln asks and that gives Clarke pause. 

“Good thing I'm not tired,” Clarke says and sends Lincoln a small smile. “Thanks for the tip.” She means it as a peace offering between them and Lincoln seems to take it that way.

“Just a hunch.” And then Lincoln is gone. 

Clarke climbs the stairs to Kane's second floor and for a moment, her weariness catches up with her. The room she's come to think of as her own in Kane's home has a small, neat bed, a fluffy pillow and floral sheets, the kind Clarke loved as a child. It would be so easy to go sleep, but Lincoln’s question nags at the back of her mind. 

“What's the expression?” Clarke asks the hallway pictures of Kane's mother, a plump, kind looking woman. “That's right: I'll sleep when I’m dead.”

Kane keeps the rarest of his books in his home, too protective of them to put them in what is still technically a college library. He keeps them a hidden room on the second floor, another asset of the house Clarke can't imagine him explaining away to prospective buyers. Clarke pushes on the false wall and it swings open, letting the paper scented air gust softly out. Clarke turns on the little lamp by the door and sighs as she scans the walls. They rarely consult these books in research, mainly because they are so oddly specific you have to know the exactly what you're looking for to make any sense of the indexes, and even Kane considers them to be unnecessarily dense. 

Clarke settles on a huge old book titled “Wayes of The Classical Daemons: Their Characteristics, Qualities and Detailed Histories”. The fact that Clarke very much does not want to read this book makes her think it's a promising choice. She sets it carefully on the desk that's hardly large enough to hold it and flips it open. 

Clarke may not like research, but that doesn't mean she's bad at it. Before Slaying became her thing, she had liked school. She had dreamt of going to college, made plans with Wells to attend schools in the same region so they could see each other. She had wanted to be an engineer like her dad, or a doctor like her mom... she still hadn't decided. That had been exciting- the fact that she had choices. She thinks she had wanted a family, maybe, in that way girls her age thought about it abstractly. 

Even knowing what she's looking for, it takes Clarke about forty-five minutes to find Praesanim in the index, and when she turns to the right page, the writing is so small and cramped, Clarke almost gives up. Instead, she props her elbows on the table, sets her fingers to her temples and slowly begins to decipher the old English script. 

“‘ _Praesanim’_ ,” Clarke reads aloud to keep herself focused, “‘ _first documented of its kind appearing in 109 BC, discovered by Thaddius Thadonium, inventor of…_ ’ No, I don't care. Not relevant...” 

She skims through the ‘Detailed Historie’ of Thaddius’ military career and later family life. “Fuck me, I'm never reading this book again,” Clarke grumbles as she reaches the end of Thaddius’ very long, dull life without a single mention of Praesanim, and sighs when at least the next paragraph starts with a reference to the demon.

“Okay, ‘ _Praesanim, common demon_ … _Often found in cohorts of other Praesanim_ ,’ where's your cohort, Blake? Couldn't find any other assholes who decided to become murder demons? ‘ _Recruited for military and known for sharp claws, unusual markings and teeth a centimeter longer than an average humans._ ’ Thanks for that, I’m definitely going to be looking at his teeth with my ruler,” Clarke snorts. “‘ _Praesanim are…_ ’ Huh.”

Clarke leans back in her chair and pulls the book onto her legs, propping it up, “‘ _Praesanim do not breed, nor do they reproduce in any way. To continue their breed, a ritual turning a human to demon is required. They are invincible except for_ ,’ No, I know that part… _‘Praesanim ritual includes knowledge of Praesanim habits and ways and were specifically popular at the start of the Medieval Ages, as their name rightly suggests…_ ’ No fucking way…

“‘ _...as their name rightly suggests. Coming from the root words Praeses, used either as a noun: keeper, or in its adjective form: guarding; and animus: soul, Praesanim demons do not give up their souls like all other types of demonhood that are achieved through human mutation. Rather, as Thaddeus noted, their soul remains and Praesanim trade other, usually small aspects or qualities of themselves for the demon power_.’”

Clarke stops and frowns. “So you're just an extra huge dick, Blake.” The demon down in the basement didn't even have the excuse of being a soulless monster: he had a soul and he was still willing to let- to help- a vampire feed on humans. 

Monty had to have been right about the power aspect of Blake’s motivations. Clarke keeps reading, but the only other interesting information she can glean from the dense passages, which mostly detail notable Praesanim massacres, military movements and one exceptionally dry passage about Praesanim farming habits, is that Praesanim are one of the few demons that vampires don't actively despise.

“That's sweet, I guess,” Clarke murmurs, scrubbing a hand across her face, “Murder siblings forever until I stake you both in the heart.”

Clarke pushes the book off her lap and looks up blearily at the clock, her vision swimming after staring for such a long time at the tiny scrawl. She realizes it's past three in the morning and Clarke stands up slowly, dizzy with exhaustion. She turns the light out in the hidden library and staggers into her room, dropping down onto the bed without bothering to change or get under the covers. She's so tired she doesn't remember Lincoln’s prompting except for an echo of it in her spinning, last half moments of consciousness. 

_Why would a demon and vampire come looking for me? How about hope?_

*

When Clarke wakes up in the morning, feeling muzzy and disoriented with her lack of sleep, it takes her a moment to come back to herself, staring at the cieling, body still until she figures out where she is. She pushes herself up on her forearms and squints in the sunlight- she’s slept later than she has in a long while. Her hair is a disaster when she glances in the mirror and she spares a moment to comb her fingers through it before scraping it back up into a ponytail before stumbling downstairs to Kane’s kitchen. Kane looks surprised to see her awake, but pours her a mug of tea and hands it to her.

“You look like you slept well,” Kane ventures. “I didn’t expect you up so early,” he says. “Plans with Raven or Monty?”

Clarke takes a gulp of tea and winces at how hot it is. “Just our demons in the basement,” she says and when Kane is quiet she looks up at him. “What, you didn’t think I would let you handle them alone did you?”

“I had figured you might like a day off from your duties, that’s all. You know I’m perfectly capable of protecting myself, Clarke.”

“Sure,” Clarke says. “But come on, you think I’m gonna ditch before we find out where your late birthday presents are?”

“No,” Kane says and smile tugs at his mouth. “Why don’t you let me take the lead on this. I think you’re a little too close to this one.”

“I’m not,” Clarke says and hears the mild annoyance in her voice. She manages to smile. “I’m happy to let you do the talking. But-” Clarke says, “Fun fact: did you know Praesanim keep their souls?” 

Kane frowns at her. “I looked it up last night,” she explains. “Just some bedtime reading, but Blake- he has a soul.”

“What do you want to do about that?” Kane asks after a moment of silence. 

“Nothing,” Clarke says grimly. “He’s made his choices. These are the consequences.” She doesn’t mention Lincoln’s other theory to Kane, the one that prompted him telling Clarke to do the research. The reason why Blake and Octavia are in Arkville in the first place. It doesn’t matter. As she’s told Lincoln, she’s going to slay them anyway.

“If he has his soul, he has to feel something about the fact that his sister is now a Vampire,” Kane says slowly and Clarke shrugs.

“That’s saying he wasn’t a psychopath before he turned himself,” Clarke says cooly. “For all we know, Blake was a demon before Octavia was turned. You said the Council was busy with something else at the time, right?”

“That’s a theory...” Kane says, but he doesn’t sound convinced. Clarke shrugs and takes another sip of tea.

They make their way down the stairs to the basement, Clarke keeping her hands inside her hoodie pockets, her stake a hard, sharp reminder of who she is tucked into the back pocket of her jeans. 

When they kept Maya down here, there was the sound of her pacing in her cell, or her fingernails dragging along the walls, scrabbling at the hinges of the doors, seeking a way out. Sometimes her voice would lift and she would beg Jasper to come talk to her, that she knew who she was and she would never hurt him.

Now there is only silence, and it’s eery for knowing that there are two demons behind these doors. “Wait.” Clarke stops Kane before he can unlock the door to Blake’s cell and ducks into Kane’s office. The live feed is playing on the tiny little television screens, muted and grayscale, flickering and jumping a little due to the poor signal. 

Octavia is awake. She’s dragged herself from where Clarke left her propped against the wall to one of the corners and is sitting perfecting still, face smooth like a human, staring at the door. Her head is cocked, as if listening, and Clarke knows she’s heard them. 

In his cell, Blake is exactly where they lift him, but he’s gathered his legs under him, is crouching so that his arms aren’t extended at such a sharp angle above his head. He could stand, Clarke knows, but it looks like it’s taking everything he has to be braced up on his feet, the drug still in his system. Unlike Octavia’s face, his shows the evidence of his evil, the sharp cuts on his face clear even through the grainy footage. Clarke frowns absently at his image and turns back to Kane. 

“Just checking,” she says by explanation. “Can’t be too careful.”

When they unlock the door to Blake’s cell, the demon tenses, thighs shifting and he bares his teeth. His wrists look bloody and raw, chaffing from where he’s pulled at his restraints. “Morning,” Clarke mutters to him and fits her back into the corner by the door, pulls the door closed behind Kane and watches him consider the demon on the floor. 

“Would you be more comfortable standing, perhaps?” Kane asks Blake coolly. The disinterest in his voice always wigs Clarke out when he puts it on. It’s not the Kane she’s come to know, the Kane she trusts and she hates feeling like she doesn’t recognize him.

“Go to hell,” Blake mutters, voice still a little muzzy and slurred from the drug. “Where is Octavia?”

“If you can’t be civil, I have no problem making that choice for you,” Kane says and walks to corner where he can adjust the straps. He gives them a hard jerk and Blake lurches to his feet, hissing as his arms are pulled up roughly, his legs scrabbling to find purchase and strength to relieve the pressure on his shoulders. “Better?” Kane asks.

Blake snarls but doesn’t answer. His eyes slide from Kane to Clarke and he glares at her. “Where is my sister?”

“Hey,” Kane says, snapping his fingers. “You’re talking to me.” Blake ignores him, stares hard at Clarke for another moment daring her to answer.

“Got nothing to say now that your Watcher’s taken over, huh?” He goads and Clarke raises her eyebrows, unimpressed. She meets Blake’s glare full on until the demon shakes his head,\ and refocuses on Kane. 

“Where is my sister?” He repeats, this time to Kane. His voice is getting stronger, clearer and his eyes sharper. 

“She’s still breathing,” Kane assures him. “Clarke hasn’t staked her yet.” 

A flicker of relief washes over Blake’s face and Clarke see’s Kane catch it. “You may infer, of course, that her relative safety depends on your cooperation. So why don’t you and I have a chat?” 

Kane grabs a chair from the corner across from Clarke and settles it in front of Blake, sits down and clasps his hands. “I won’t talk to you,” Blake rasps, but he doesn’t sound as sure of himself anymore. 

“It’s talk to me or I send my Slayer down the hall to take out your sister. What do you think, hm?” Blake glares hard at him and then his eyes flick to Clarke again and she shifts slightly towards the door, happy to back up whatever tactic Kane is using to get to Blake.

“No, no,” Blake snaps, panic lacing his voice. “I’ll talk to you, ok?” He doesn’t even ask for proof that Octavia is still there. “Just don’t… don’t…” He strains against the straps around his wrists as if to get to Clarke, stop her from leaving the room and she takes her hand off the door latch. Something rolls in the pit of her stomach as Blake sags a bit in his restraints as she does and Clarke looks away from where the demon with a soul is restrained. Just a demon.

“Bellamy Blake,” Kane is saying, leaning back in his seat. “Youngest Watcher to be brought into the Council in generations with so much potential… and look where you’ve ended up. A thief, a killer, protecting a vampire. How did you end up here?”

Blake glares hard at Kane again. “You’re asking me that?” he growls. “Fuck you, you’re asking me how I ended up here? You’re Council, you-”

“We’re not,” Clarke says sharply, voice loud and surprising her over Blake’s low rumble. “We aren’t Council.”

Kane turns to look over his shoulder at Clarke, maybe trying to calm her but Blake’s eyes also find her again and there’s nothing by malice now. 

“Oh now you want to talk,” he growls. 

“We left,” Clarke says, her heart racing in her chest, though she doesn’t know why, only that she can’t stand to be compared to the men and women who locked her and Kane up to die. “We’ve broken from the Council. We are not them.”

“You’re a Slayer,” Blake snaps. “You have a Watcher. You have holding cells. How are you anything but?”

“That’s enough,” Kane cuts over Blake and stands so suddenly that the demon startles a bit, head going up and back as if expecting to be hit, his biceps tensing. “I told you, you’re talking to me. Not the Slayer. So why don’t you tell me where the books are?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Blake says after a moment. 

“Oh no? So your sister isn’t worth the price of those books, is that it?”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“No? Well you’re not in charge here, Blake. I am. So if you think there’s any chance of you or Octavia coming out of this still breathing, you might want to start talking. Tell me where the books are.”

“I can’t give them to you,” Blake snarls. “Look, I’ll give you anything else you want: information on demons, cults, hell, I’ll take them out for you myself. Just not the books.”

“What’s so important in those books? Power? Complete invincibility? It must be something good if you’re willing to gamble your sister’s and your own life on it,” Kane says and Clarke hears him trying to find another in, probing for another weakness in the demon’s defenses, more information on who he’s become. Blake looks exhausted but his mouth is a thin line, eyes dark and hard. 

“Come on, Blake. I remember your record: a guy like you would have figured all that out by now. Why hang on to those books? What’s so good that it’s worth risking your lives over now?” But this tactic seems to piss him off more rather than get him monologuing.

“What’s so good?” Blake spits. “What’s so good? Try ‘my sister’s soul’.” Blake’s eyes have gone dark and his teeth are bared. Clarke closes her eyes, just for a moment. Lincoln was right. 

Blake strains forward again, his hands curling around the straps on his wrist and clenching viciously, raws wrists chaffing further. “Which I wouldn’t even need if-”

“You know she isn’t your sister anymore, don’t you?” Kane cuts him off, overly cruel. “There’s only a demon left with her memories. If you had any kindness in you, you would have staked her the moment she came back.”

“She’s my sister!” Blake shouts, voice gone raw. “She’s my sister, I could never- never-” he chokes on the words for a moment, body shuddering and then he seems to gather himself. “They told me the same thing,” he growls low in his throat.”The Council, when they finally contacted me. To stake her. After what they’d done, after-”

“ _That’s enough!”_ Kane snaps. “Tell us where the books are or I swear-”

“No, wait,” Clarke says, stepping off the wall and both Blake and Kane’s eyes fall on her. 

“Clarke-” Kane starts but she shakes her head, holding her out her hand.

“After what?” Clarke asks. “What did the Council do?”

Blake glares at her, breath coming in harsh pants through his mouth. He closes his mouth suddenly and straightens. “Let me go and I’ll tell you,” he counters.

“Bellamy,” Clarke says, trying his name out, watching his eyes widen slightly in surprise. “When I was eighteen the Council drugged me and locked me up with a vampire to test my skill as a Slayer. And they put Kane in with me because they thought he had become too lenient. They wanted to teach me a lesson, but I taught them they had no control over me. Tell me what they did to you.”

Blake’s lip curls. “Don’t you know? The Council betrayed my sister. They betrayed and murdered all their Potentials.”

“That’s a lie,” Kane snaps and Clarke looks at him, surprised. “It’s not true.”

“Shumway told me,” Blake snarls, his voice vicious. “When I tracked him down. He told me everything.” A smile twists his mouth, mean and satisfied at once, “before I killed him. He told me about Diana and- what was it? The immortal life she was promised?”

“I said _enough_ ,” Kane warns him, moving forward as if to actually make good on his promise to strike Blake but Clarke catches her arm.

“Kane, what are you doing? Stop. We should know this.” Clarke tugs on his arm, but Kane doesn’t meet her eyes and suddenly Clarke feels something cold unfurl in her chest. She looks back up at Blake.

“Explain,” Clarke says to the demon, her heart beating uncomfortably in her chest. “Tell me what happened.”

“You don’t know? You hate the Council but you don’t know this? My sister’s death wasn’t an accident. Sydney sent out the locations of all the known Potentials, organized a strike on the Slayer and arranged for all the Potentials to be killed on the same night. No, you don’t know this? How can you hate the Council and not know the worst that they’ve done?”

“When was this?” Clarke demands, feeling a tremor in her hands. “Tell me!” She shouts, slamming her fist into the wall and denting it when the demon looks like he might not answer her. 

“Five years ago,” Blake says, but his tone has changed. There’s something in his eyes that has shifted, a little like surprise and a disturbing amount like pity. It makes Clarke feel sick.

It feels like something is crawling up her spine, up her throat and when she asks again, “When?” she sounds afraid.

Blake’s mouth turns down at the corners. “I think you know,” he says quietly. 

Clarke thinks of lilacs in bloom and how odd it was the Wells and her father came back to her house so late that night, so long after sunset. Late enough that it would have been dark all across the country and in most of the world. 

“Tell me anyway,” Clarke rasps and when Kane says her name, reaches out to touch her arm, she flinches back. “No! Tell me,” she insists.

“May. May 22nd,” Blake says, like the date is seared into his mind the way the same date makes Clarke feel nauseous when she thinks about it.

Clarke was expecting it, but she still feels light headed, still has to reach out and steady herself against the back of the chair. The world tips around her and she closes her eyes against the rushing in her ears. She thinks she hears Kane saying her name and it makes bile rise in her throat. She turns her back and just manages to get to the door, to the hallway, before she’s leaning her burning forehead against the cool stairrail, retching up stomach bile and tea. It leaves a heavy acid taste across her tongue and she coughs as wipes her palm across her mouth. 

“Fuck,” she whispers under her breath and squeezes her nails into her palms as she curls her hands into fists.

“Clarke?” She looks up to find Kane’s followed her into the hallway.

“You lied to me,” Clarke chokes. “You said… you said… why didn’t you tell me?” She means it to come out as a plea, means to ask Kane to assure her Blake is lying, but it just comes out hollow and dead. She already knows the truth of it. Kane doesn’t deny it.

“What good would it have done?” Kane asks her, his voice hoarse. He looks like he wants to touch her, offer her comfort the way he usually does, a hand on her shoulder or give her a one armed hug, but Clarke thinks his touch would make her sick, make her skin crawl. Kane sees her flinch and drops his hand. “I just wanted to protect you.”

“Protect me? You had me work for the Council after what they did to my family? To the Blakes? To… how many others?”

Kane looks down at the floor. When he speaks, his voice is as tired as Clarke has ever heard it. “There were twenty-nine known Potentials and the Slayer. We lost all but you and two others that night. But Clarke, we found you all to protect you. To prepare you. We never wanted to hurt you. What Diana Sydney did-”

“You should have told me,” Clarke interrupts him, cold. “You should have given me the truth. You knew how I felt, you knew what I thought. You let me blame myself! And all this time… the Council knew about me?”

“I have never wanted you to feel responsible for Jake’s and Wells’ deaths, Clarke. But you wouldn’t have trusted me if you knew the truth.”

Clarke is silent for a long time, because it’s true. But Kane has lied to her now for five years, and the past three feel especially painful, because she had thought she had been done with the lies and the secrets. Kane had promised her she was. But he had kept this from her as well and when she looks at him in the sterile light of the hallway she feels as if she doesn’t know him.

“How long did they know about me?” Clarke whispers.

“Since you were eight.” Kane’s voice is nearly unrecognizable, hoarse with emotion. He’s got his hand out, steadying himself against the wall. “One of the youngest to present signs of a Potential.” 

Somewhere, way deep down, under the anger and the hurt and exhaustion of it all, Clarke thinks she must feel sorry for Kane, but she can’t identify it if that sympathy is actually there. She wonders vaguely if she can even empathize anymore.

“Eight? Why the hell didn’t I know? Why wasn’t I trained? Why didn’t I have a... oh no,” she whispers and thinks of all the martial arts classes her mom signed her up for, Abby’s late night phone calls for work, her hands that sometimes shook when she hugged Clarke after seeing something on the news.

Kane looks at her, eyes sad. “Your mother wanted to give you a normal childhood. She had convinced herself you wouldn’t be Chosen, Clarke. She just wanted to keep you safe.”

“You did this for her,” Clarke chokes and realizes there are tears on her cheeks. She rubs at them viciously because she will not cry, not now. “You lied to protect her. At my expense.”

“In part,” Kane says quietly. “Yes, for part it was for her, I won’t deny that. Your mother is my friend, Clarke. But she blames herself more than you know for what happened. She-”

“Good,” Clarke snaps. “She should. She worked for an organization that exploited children. And you let me believe, all this time, that nobody knew. You let me work for the organization that destroyed my family.”

Kane is silent for a long moment and then he covers his eyes with a hand and slumps back against the wall. “I’m so sorry, Clarke,” he says. “God, I’m so sorry.”

Clarke turns her head back into the cold rail of the stairwell, can’t look at Kane like this, can’t accept his apology. For a long moment, there is only the sound of their breath in the hallway and Clarke counts down from one hundred to zero in her head, a technique Kane taught her, long ago that still helps her settle her mind when everything becomes too much. Eventually pushes herself up and turns back to the first holding cell where Blake is still restrained. 

“What are you going to do?” Kane asks her as she stares at the reinforced door. He’s hanging back, which Clarke is grateful for even as she’s angry at him not protesting more. She looks at him and sees the man she’s come to see as a second father and sees a stranger. The double vision hurts her head and she closes her eyes.

“I don’t know,” Clarke tells him. “But at least I know that much.” She opens the door and steps into the room.

Bellamy Blake is sagging in his restraints, hands limp and head bowed, perhaps taking a moment to gather his strength when both his captors had left the room. At Clarke’s footfalls, he looks up at her. His face has returned to it’s natural human form: instead of cuts, Clarke can make out his freckles in the fluorescent light. Before he can hide it, Clarke catches sight of how exhausted he looks, how much the drug is still affecting him.

He manages to give her a convincing sneer. “Is this where you tell me I’m lying and then kill me?”

For a moment, all the anger of the past five years, all the rage and isolation and bitter sadness roils up in her chest and Clarke feels her stake in her back pocket, thinks how satisfying it would be to plunge it into Blake’s chest and watch him die. For this alone- for disrupting one of the last good things in Clarke’s life, he deserves it.

But this is also the man, before he became a demon, who couldn’t stake the vampire that looked like his own sister. Clarke thinks of the dust of her father and of Wells on her hands, how she can still feel it and in one harsh movement she reaches up and rips the heavy shipping strap in half. 

Blake staggers, caught off guard and not prepared to take his own weight, but as fast as Clarke’s seen him move yet, he steadies himself and claws through the other restraint still binding his left wrist. He stumbles backward, into a corner of the room and looks at Clarke, mistrustful.

“What are you doing?” he asks her as Clarke collapses into the chair Kane had left behind. 

“I don’t know,” Clarke admits and leans forward to put her face in her hands. “But you’re the only person here who hasn’t lied to me yet. That has to count for something.”

She’s vaguely aware of Blake shifting, of silence in the room and then the soft thump of his back leaning heavily into the wall. She looks up at him and he’s slid down to the floor and his hands, where they rest next to him on the floor have a fine tremor in them. She did that, Clarke realizes and something like shame curls in her stomach.

“You’re… you’re not going to kill us?” Blake asks after a moment. “Me and my sister?”

“No,” Clarke says and is surprised to find she’s telling the truth. “Maybe you both deserve it, but I can’t. You’re here because you couldn’t stake your family. I’m here because I could kill mine. They’re two kinds of evils and I don’t know which is worse.

“But we’re both here because of the Council, despite the odds.” She’s quiet for a moment and Blake doesn’t say anything, just takes slow, deep breaths in his corner. “Are you really trying to get Octavia’s soul back?” Clarke asks him finally.

Blake’s eyes close and he grimaces. “Since the night she was turned.”

“Was that why you came looking for Lincoln?”

“The only vampire with a soul in existence,” Blake says. “I thought maybe…” he breaks off and rolls his shoulders, winces. “I thought maybe he would understand… maybe he would have a new lead.”

“You know about the gypsy curse, don't you?” 

Blake nods. “I'm not getting O’s soul back just to doom her to a life of unhappiness. I'm looking for something that will stick.”

“There's no such thing,” Clarke says bleakly. “The world isn't that kind.”

“There might be,” Blake says quietly. “Maybe.”

Clarke watches him. Blake’s head is tipped back against the wall, eyes closed and brows knit, like talking hurts him. She realizes in the last twelve hours he's been drugged, captured; strung up and forced to talk. He may be a demon, but his body's taken a beating. She thinks about the panic in his eyes, how he strained against his cuffs when he thought Clarke might go down the hall and stake Octavia. 

“If I help you,” Clarke starts, not even sure of what she's saying. “I need a guarantee that you can control Octavia. And that after it’s done, you’ll give us the books you stole.”

Blake rolls his head to look at her and there's contempt and distrust in his eyes. “You help me?” He repeats. “Why the fuck would you help me?”

“I don't know,” Clarke admits and tips her head back in the chair. “But I'm tired of this. I'm so fucking tired and I want to do something good. Recovering a murdered girl’s soul seems like a shoe-in for that. And you can't be all evil, no one is, even if you did chose to turn yourself into a demon.”

“Isn't the Slayer the definition of good?” Blake mutters. “Siding with a demon and vampire seems like a step in the wrong direction.”

“Thanks for the lecture. I’ve made my decision.”

“Yeah? And what’s you’re Watcher going to say?” Blake snarks quietly, his lip curling up but not looking at her.

“Honestly? I don’t give a fuck,” Clarke snaps. “Look,” she says at his skeptical eyebrow. “I don’t like you, and this isn’t about choosing you over Kane or anything like that. But you know what? All I have done is slay demons and vampires and watch people's lives fall apart in the aftermath. For once, I'd like to see something good happen by my hand.” 

When she looks up at Blake he's watching her, suspicious but listening. “You know how short Slayer’s lives are,” she says. “Statistically I'm running out of time to make that happen.”

He doesn't deny it, doesn't try to soften the truth of it, just purses his lips in a bitter line and nods slowly. “Alright,” he says. “Octavia's willing to drink pig’s blood when she has to. I've tried to limit… Well, it doesn't matter. But she'll do it if I ask her to.”

“And the books?” Clarke prompts.

“They’re yours. I won’t need them after it’s all over.”

“Ok,” Clarke says. “I'll help you. You can use our library, talk to Lincoln… If there's a solution out there, we'll find it.” 

Blake nods a bit and then looks away, tilts his head back up against the wall. “Thank you,” he says after a moment. “Clarke,” he adds like he's remembering manners. “Thank you, Clarke.”

“Don't worry about it, Bellamy.” Clarke says as she tips her head back again and closes her eyes. She's so tired, and for a moment, she lets herself feel it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Here I am on tumblr!](http://verbam.tumblr.com/) Come hang out with me~
> 
> Feedback and comments are always appreciated, as are kudos! Thanks love doves.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  
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> Meg continues to make beautiful graphics for this story. She is amazing and I love her.
> 
> Thanks for all the amazing comments and kudos you guys!! You all are such great motivators and have such wonderful insights into this story!! I really love hearing what y'all are thinking- it really does inspire me.
> 
> And thank you to my lovely betas as always- cetaprincipessa and storyskein, who stepped in this week for me!

Clarke’s not sure how long she stays in the small room with Blake. It’s not long enough that the thump of her heart gets any less painful, each beat sending that sick, sharp prick of loneliness through her. Blake, she thinks, might still be fighting off whatever lasting effects of the tranq are in his system. He’s pale underneath his freckles and his brow is furrowed, when she bothers to look at him, his head tipped back and mouth a hard, determined line.

Clarke is glad for his distraction. She needs the quiet, pseudo-privacy of the boxed cell to put herself back together. Her thoughts feel frantic and disorganized, emotional and chaotic in a way they haven’t been in a long time. She takes slow deep breaths, and across the room, hears Blake adjust his breathing, whether consciously or not, to match hers. It helps, a little, having the external reminder to breathe slowly, a reminder that it’s okay to take a moment to recover.

When her thoughts fall back into order, the wild whirl slowing and emotions slotting back into their proper, contained places, Clarke blinks back that glaze of tears in her eyes, refusing to let herself cry. It’s nothing, this is nothing. Whatever happened in the past can stay there, it shouldn’t have any effect going forward she tells herself. She can overcome the anxious, sick feeling in her stomach at the thought of seeing Kane, she knows she can.

“Hey,” Blake husks as Clarke sits up and runs a hand through her hair, trying to rally herself. “Can I see Octavia now?”

“Sure,” Clarke says and is glad her voice is steady. “Come on.” She stands and watches as Blake struggles to his feet. He has to lean against the wall for a moment, steady himself, and Clarke can tell from the narrowing of his eyes and clench of his jaw he’s not pleased with her seeing it. 

Clarke doesn’t offer to help, simply because she doesn’t feel like it.

Blake nods after a moment and steps away from the wall and Clarke opens the door for him, follows him out into the hall, hand automatically going to her stake as Blake pauses and looks around. He doesn’t do anything other than shake his head and mutter, “Fucking Council,” under his breath.

“I told you,” Clarke snaps. “That’s not us.”

“I heard you,” Blake says darkly. “Where’s Octavia?”

“Clarke?” Kane is leaning out of the office where Clarke realizes he must have been watching her and Blake in the room on the security feed. He’s eyeing Blake carefully, a small crossbow in his hands, but not drawing it on the demon yet. “Everything ok?” Kane asks her.

“Fine,” Clarke says. “Bellamy wants to see his sister.”

“And we’re letting him?” Kane asks. His voice isn’t skeptical, but it’s certainly cautious. He tries to catch Clarke’s eye but she looks at the wall past his shoulder, knowing the rumbling hot rage she’s only just managed to tamp down and bundle away will bubble over if she meets Kane’s eyes right now and sees his regret.

“Seeing as we’re going to help Bellamy get Octavia’s soul back, yes.” Clarke manages to keep her voice strong and inflect all the authority Kane’s taught her to posses into it. She sees Kane frown. “I’ve made my decision,” Clarke says harshly and Blake glances at her. She glares at him, because he’s an easy target and nods down the hallway. “Octavia is down there.”

Blake nods and then shoots a dark look at Kane and moves down the hall. Clarke starts to follow him but Kane catches her arm.

“Clarke,” he says, voice soft. “Have you thought this through? Do you really think we can trust them?”

Clarke shakes him off roughly, barely manages to contain the outburst that roils up in her. “He’s told me the truth, Kane. And that’s all I’ve got right now,” she snaps. “Give me the key.” Kane searches her face but then steps back and grabs the key off the hook and passes it to her. 

“Just be careful,” he says. “You’re putting us all at risk if you’re wrong about this.”

Clarke doesn’t bother to answer him, just follows Blake down the hall to where he’s waiting by the door, agitated and antsy. Octavia is still in the corner Clarke had seen her in on the feed in Kane’s office when Clarke opens the door and she’s watching them, face perfectly impassive. 

“O,” Blake breathes, voice rough and he crosses the room faster than Clarke expects with the drug still in his system. “God, O, are you okay?”

“Bell,” Octavia says, her voice, like her brother’s, is low and gravely. She wraps her arms around Blake’s shoulders as he pulls her into a fierce hug, but she’s watching Clarke with cool blue eyes even as she squeezes Blake in return. “What’s she doing here?” she growls as Blake pulls back. “Why haven’t you killed her?”

“The Slayer’s going to help us, Octavia,” Blake tells her softly. “Ok? She’s on our side. Come on, let’s get you up.”

Octavia doesn’t move, just looks between Blake and Clarke and her lip curls. “She’s the Slayer, Bell. You said she was Council. ”

“I know, I know,” Blake says and he glances over his shoulder at Clarke. She lifts an eyebrow and he narrows his eyes. He shifts so his back is facing her and drops his voice, making it softer and gentler than Clarke would have thought he was capable of. “I was wrong, O, ok? The Slayer- Clarke, she’s not with the Council. Same thing happened to her that happened to us, she just got lucky. But this is what we’ve been waiting for, huh?”

“You said it was just us,” Octavia snaps. “Bellamy, you said we can’t trust anyone but us.”

“I know what I said, Octavia,” Blake tells her, squeezing her hand. “But I was wrong, ok? Clarke has access to her Watcher’s library. And she’s with Lincoln. We don’t have to trust her, we just have to work with her.”

“If it helps,” Clarke offers, leaning back against the wall by the door and not bothering to hide her dislike. “I don’t trust you either.”

“She hurt me!” Octavia growls, ignoring Clarke completely and glaring at Bellamy. “She locked us both up, Bellamy.”

“To be fair,” Clarke says dryly, “You were trying to kill me.”

“Did I ask you, Slayer?” Octavia snarls, rounding on Clarke. “You think you’re special because you’re the Chosen one?”

“Hey, you should consider yourself lucky that I’m not staking you,” Clarke snaps back. “I agreed to help you and your brother, a little gratitude might be nice.”

“Right, and you must feel real special about that.” Octavia hisses. “We don’t need your help. We don’t need the Council’s bitch.”

“O, O, hey,” Blake tries to soothe her even as he glares over his shoulder at Clarke. “What did I say, huh? Clarke’s not going to hurt us, I promise. She’s not going to keep us locked up.”

“She’s not like us, Bellamy,” Octavia says, dropping her voice even as she continues to glare at Clarke. “She can’t understand us.”

“Maybe not,” Blake agrees, “but she’s the best shot we’ve got. Come on, O, trust me on this one. Have I ever let you down before?”

Octavia looks like she wants to argue but she just rolls her shoulders in a clearly petulant shrug, one that screams little sister.

“There are some rules,” Clarke starts and Blake shoots her an exasperated look over his shoulder. 

“Would you just-” Blake snaps and then takes a short, annoyed breath and pushes himself up to stand. “Clarke, could you just let me and my sister have a moment?”

“Octavia needs to know-”

“See? She’s already trying to control us, Bellamy,” Octavia growls from the floor and Blake holds up his hand, the same motion that Clarke saw him use just two nights ago when she first encountered them. Octavia doesn’t say anything else, but she growls deep and low in her throat.

“O, just… just wait, ok? Clarke, please. I’ve already promised you what you wanted. Let me talk to my sister.” Clarke can hear the undercurrent of authority in Blake’s voice, recognizes the Watcher in him trying to negotiate with the Slayer in her and she bristles against it. Anger feels good.

Blake must see it in her eyes because he straightens his spine and tilts his chin up, trying to use his height to his advantage. There’s a flicker there, though, of frustration. It’s not anger or necessarily posturing, but a look of resigned, expected annoyance that she won’t listen to him. It takes her by surprise, that look, like Blake has been ignored time and time again and had to learn to expect to rise to the challenge of being ignored. She remembers that feeling, those early years when the Council came to monitor her progress and spoke over her.

She doesn’t want to make someone feel that way, even a demon, especially when he already so strongly associates her with the Council. Clarke catches her snarled words on the tip of her tongue and swallows them, gives Blake a quick, curt nod instead.

“Ok. Talk to Octavia. I’ll be in the hall.”

Blake blinks in surprise but then nods in return, a duck of his head a press of his lips that looks grateful even if he doesn’t verbalize it. “Ok.”

Clarke steps out in the hall and pulls the door halfway closes behind her. Kane isn’t waiting for her as she half expected him to, but he is sitting in his office when Clarke sticks her head in. He’s watching the video screens intently and Clarke can make out the blurry image of Blake crouched next to Octavia, head cocked and expression soft. Kane glances up at Clarke but doesn’t say anything.

“I promised Blake he could use your library. And when it’s all over, he’ll give you back the books he took,” Clarke says, voice hard, struggling to look at Kane.

Kane is silent for a long time, and Clarke doesn’t look up at him. She doesn’t know what else to say, how to bridge this chasm that’s opened between them. And maybe that’s what it’ll just have to be between them now, Clarke thinks in exhausted resignation. Slayers die alone, and this is just another step closer to that prophecy. 

“Even if he has a soul, Clarke, he’s still killed people. You heard him, he admitted to killing a Council member, he tried to kill you,” Kane begins in his low, persuasive voice and Clarke stares harder at the floor. “He’s been letting Octavia feed on people for five years. If you’re thinking that him having a soul means he’s like Lincoln-”

“I’m not,” Clarke snaps. “Listen, I know Blake is dangerous, but it’s the Council’s fault he’s turned into what he is. They trained him and then they let Octavia get murdered. If it weren’t for them, Blake would still be some nobody we wouldn’t have to deal with it. As it is, I’m cleaning up after the Council’s mess- your mess, Kane- and once Octavia gets her soul back, they won’t be a problem anymore.”

“How do you know, Clarke? What’s to say Bellamy Blake hasn’t developed a taste for killing? What do you think will stop him once he’s gotten Octavia’s soul back?”

“Because I believe him,” Clarke says before she even realizes she’s going to say it, but it’s true. There’s a certainty in her that Blake will keep his word, a painful kind of sympathy that she can’t dwell on too much without things coming up she would rather didn’t, but she knows that much is true. She trusts Bellamy Blake enough to know that whatever he’s done, it’s come from outrage for his sister’s lost life and that fierce protective nature that put him in between Clarke’s stake and Octavia two nights ago, kept him from killing Kane when Clarke had her stake over Octavia’s heart. 

She saw the honesty and unexpected gratitude in his eyes when he accepted her offer of help. 

“Listen, I don’t like him Kane, and I don’t think he’s made the best decisions, but Blake has acted out of loyalty and love for his sister. I… I have to believe in that,” Clarke says and struggles past the unexpected catch in her throat. 

When she meets Kane’s eyes, there’s pity in them that Clarke can’t stand. “But you don’t need to worry,” she continues harshly. “If I’m wrong, I’ll kill him.”

“Slaying him might be difficult after you’ve worked with him, Clarke. After you’ve helped him get what he wants,” Kane says, voice gentle but with the same tone of voice he used when he had to reminder her of her duties when she was younger. “I just don’t want to see you put yourself in a position that’s going to hurt you.”

“You don’t need to worry about that,” Clarke says cooly. “I don’t see any risk of getting attached.”

On the flickering grey screen, Blake straightens and helps Octavia to her feet, pulling her arm around his shoulder so he can support her weight. Clarke nods at the TV screen. “We need somewhere for them to stay. Somewhere I can keep an eye on them. Trust but verify, right?”

Kane sighs and shakes his head. “Why don’t we take them upstairs? Give them some food.”

“Ok,” Clarke agrees. She gets up and meets Blake and Octavia in the hallway, Kane following her quietly. Octavia’s face is cloudy but she doesn’t say anything when she sees Clarke and Kane. “We’ve got some painkillers upstairs,” Clarke offers her as Octavia winces when she puts weight on her bad leg. “And pig’s blood.”

Octavia wrinkles her nose but Blake squeezes her wrist. “That’s appreciated. Thank you.”

Clarke lets Kane lead the way up the stairs and follows them up. She hears him formally invite Octavia into his home and Clarke locks them basement door behind her. She can hear Kane’s voice in the kitchen, polite and careful, but still sure of himself. Clarke grabs her phone from where she left it on the elegant little coffee table by the stairs where Kane puts fresh flowers in the summer and dried flowers in the winter and finds new texts from Monty and Raven.

 _Want to come have celebratory demon slaying brunch?_ Raven had sent her just half an hour ago. Clarke stares numbly down at her phone and doesn’t know what to say. It’s easy to stick behind her decision in front of Kane, but it’s less so with Raven. 

Clarke calls Raven and winces when she answers, bubbly and morning fresh. “Hey babe,” she chirps.

“Hey,” Clarke says, trying to inflect some lightness into her voice. “So brunch, huh?”

“Yeah. Monty and I had talked about hitting up Polaris. We need something greasy after last night. Man, Clarke, you would have loved this party we found, Monty brought his homebrew and 

Niylah was there.”

“Yeah?” Clarke asks, letting Raven’s voice wash over her and letting herself pretend for a moment that that was her life: parties and alcohol, hanging out with her friends and hooking up with beautiful people because it felt good. If the worst thing she had to worry about was a fallout with a partner or a fight with a friend… Clarke can’t even imagine how simple it would all be. 

“Yep,” Raven says and Clarke can hear the smirk in her voice. “She asked about you. But also, if you’re not all demon-slayed out, there was some kid hanging around the party last night. And not in the trying to get booze kind of way.”

“About that,” Clarke says, closing her eyes, already anticipating Raven’s reaction. “Plans changed, slightly.”

“Really?” Raven asks, sounding distracted. “What happened?”

“Well, there’s less slayage and more research,” Clarke offers.

There’s a beat and then Raven whines, “Does this mean no celebratory brunch?”

“Yeah, not yet,” Clarke sighs. “Want to come to Kane’s and I can fill you in?”

“Am I going to hate this?” Raven asks and Clarke can’t help her dark laugh. “I’m going to hate this, aren’t I?”

“Probably.”

“Fine,” Raven sighs in the most put upon way Clarke’s ever heard from her. “See you in ten. I’ll bring Monty.”

“Grab Lincoln if you can,” Clarke says and Raven grunts in acknowledgment before the line goes dead and Clarke tucks her phone into her pocket. When she steps into the kitchen, Kane is seated at one end of his kitchen table and trying to politely chat with the Blake siblings while Octavia hungrily sucks blood from a mug with a straw. Clarke recognizes that mug- it’s one she got Kane for Christmas two years ago, garish with angry looking kittens on it. She’s still kind of pleased with that one. Whatever Blake told Octavia when Clarke had left them in her cell seemed to have worked because Octavia barely glances up at Clarke, seeming totally at ease in her spot at the table.

Blake is leaning back in the corner of the kitchen, arms crossed and watching Kane with clear mistrust. His eyes snap to Clarke when she joins them and she lifts her eyebrows in turn. 

“Raven is coming over, with Lincoln and Monty,” she tells Kane as she pulls out a seat and sits down facing Blake. She ignores Octavia’s low growl next to her and the way the girl shifts as if she thinks Clarke’s going to take her mug away from her.

“Your friends from last night?” Blake asks as he straightens and glances at Octavia. “That wasn’t part of the deal.”

“They’re part of what we do. You’ll need to deal with it.” Clarke scrubs a hand over her face, not ready to pick a fight but done with Blake’s attitude. 

“Listen, we’re better when we work with fewer people. Octavia hasn’t been around a lot of people since she was turned,” Blake tries again and Octavia lifts her head from her straw to glare at her brother.

“Yeah, because you wouldn’t let me. I can handle people, Bellamy.”

Blake frowns at her and then looks back at Clarke, almost as if he’s trying to get her to back him on this, but she just nods her chin in Octavia’s direction. “You said she would be fine with pig’s blood,” she reminds him. 

“Yes, but-” Blake starts but then pauses, shrugs and slumps back against the wall and rubs a hand across his face. “Alright, fine. Fine.” When he looks back up he just looks overwhelmed. 

Octavia grins at him and even at Kane and Clarke, her teeth pink from the blood she’s been drinking. “I used to have friends,” she says as she recaptures her straw between her lips. “I remember. Before I was a potential, I had friends.” She slurps up the last bit of blood in her mug and looks up, eyes yellow. “More?”

Kane takes her mug silently and pours more pigs blood into it before putting it in the microwave. The electric hum of it fills the kitchen and when Clarke glances at Blake, he’s staring out the window, eyes distant and shoulders hunched in like he’s wishing he could be anywhere else. Clarke can relate. 

She suddenly realizes that Blake hasn’t been given anything to eat or drink since at least the night before. She’s on her feet and grabbed a tall glass from Kane’s drying rack and fills it with water before her mind’s caught up with her body. “Here,” she says, thrusting it unceremoniously at Blake. He looks at her in surprise and takes it. He stares at his hand and the glass of water oddly, like he hadn’t expected to accept it from her, and now that he has, he doesn’t quite know what to do with it. 

Clarke moves away from him, restless in her own skin and leans back against the kitchen sink, let’s the silence stretches between them all, Blake sullen and Clarke and Kane not knowing what to say to each other. Octavia slurps down her second mug of blood without saying anything else and it’s a relief when they hear Raven and Monty come crashing through the front door. 

Kane glances at Clarke and then stands up and goes to intercept Raven and Monty in the hallway. He shoots Clarke a meaningful look over his shoulder that Clarke interprets as _Don’t be stupid_. Clarke can hear Kane’s soft voice in the hallway and the obvious silence following his words and Blake shifts, looks tense and more unhappy than he has yet. Clarke watches his eyes dart to the door, back to Octavia and then to Clarke: she sees his desperate desire to run mixed with the clearly instinctual need to fight in his dark eyes. He doesn’t trust them. 

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Raven spits in the hallway, voice venomous. “What the actual fuck?” 

As fast as Raven can make it to the kitchen from the short little hallway of Kane’s foyer, Blake crosses the kitchen and is crouched in front of Octavia, claws out and teeth bared so that when Raven rounds the doorway, he growls low and deep in his chest. “Oh fuck off,” Raven snaps at him and glares at Clarke. 

“I know,” Clarke tries, lifting her hands carefully in front of her, trying to pacify Raven. “But like I said, Raven, things changed.”

“Changed?” Raven snaps. “Clarke, the murder siblings over here are clearly still a vampire and a demon. Nothing’s changed about this situation other than the fact that they’re supposed to be dusted and you and I are supposed to be eating chocolate chip pancakes right now.” Blake flinches at her words and drops lower into his protective crouch in front of Octavia, who’s leapt to her feet, knocking her chair back and snarling with her blood pink teeth, even as she leans against the table to support her weight.

“I told you we couldn’t trust them, Bell,” Octavia snarls. “This one still wants to kill us.”

“Damn right I do,” Raven says cooly, she reaches for her belt where Clarke knows she keeps her short stakes and a knife that Finn gave her, 

“Raven, stand down,” Clarke snaps, cross the kitchen in a quick step to stand between Blake and her friend. “You don’t know the whole situation, but if you sit down, I’ll explain.”

“With these two? Are you serious right now, Clarke?”

“Yes,” Clarke says firmly and hears Blake growl behind her again. She turns and glares at him as well and drops a hand to his shoulder. “Stop it,” she hisses. “You’re not making this any easier.”

“I can smell how much she wants to kill us,” Blake snaps back.

“Yeah, ‘cause I do,” Raven counters.

“Stop it!” Clarke nearly shouts, exasperated and surprising herself. “Both of you, knock it off. Raven, we are not killing either Octavia or Bellamy. Bellamy: sit down. You’re not doing yourself any favors.”

Raven hesitates for a moment, glaring back at Clarke but when Clarke gives her a frustrated, expectant look Raven sighs and shakes her head. “Alright, Jesus, Griffin. Better be a good explanation.” She lifts her hands away from her belt and moves carefully toward the other end of the table where Kane had been sitting, keeping her eyes on both demons.

“See?” Clarke asks, turning back to Blake. “We’re fine.” Blake blinks up at her and slowly draws back, straightening and looking at Clarke with the same odd expression he gave the water glass. “Ok?” She prompts him and he nods, dropping his eyes and retreating back to lean against the wall, crossing his arms and glaring belatedly at the floor. Clarke looks expectantly at Octavia, less sure of her sway with the vampire, but the dark haired girl just narrows her eyes and drags her chair back, sitting down and fitting the straw back into her mouth.

Monty and Kane are in the doorway when Clarke looks back up and she nods to them, offering Monty a tight lipped smile as he joins them and cautiously takes the seat next to Octavia. Blake’s eyes snap up to him but doesn’t do anything more when Monty just looks at Clarke. Lincoln lingers in the threshold of the room, his eyes on Clarke, curious.

“Ok,” Clarke says, raking a hand through her hair, aware that everyone is looking to her. She tries to summon up some feeling, something to help convey what she needs to get across to them, but it’s so hard. She manages to explain in fits and starts to Lincoln, Raven and Monty about Blake and Octavia, the Council’s betrayal and Blake’s self imposed quest to get Octavia’s soul back. She shies away from her own part in the story, her own loss and the strange, unwanted connection she feels for the demon watching her intently. That’s too painful, too real and Clarke can’t go there again today. 

“...So we’re going to help them,” Clarke says, lifting her eyes to meet Raven’s. “And once we do, we can get back the Council books like Kane wanted.”

“So… what?” Raven asks, skeptical. “They’re just joining the gang?”

“No,” Clarke says firmly. “They’ll be in the library, and we’ll be keeping an eye on them-” Blake makes an annoyed noise at that and Clarke shoots him a warning look, “but other than that, you won’t see much of them. Nothing’s really changed, Raven, except that we’ll assist them where we can, help Octavia get her soul back.” Octavia lifts her eyebrows skeptically.

“What do you mean, ‘keep an eye on us?’” she asks, slouching against the table. 

“It means you’ll stay where we know you are,” Clarke tells her. “And make sure you’re not trying to find dinner out at the bars.”

Octavia looks annoyed and crosses her arms. “But frat boys taste so good.”

“O,” Blake says, sounding pained in a ridiculously human way.

“I’m just saying,” Octavia grumbles.

“Well no frat boys. Strictly butcher’s blood,” Clarke chimes in. 

“That’s no fun at all,” Octavia complains. “Seriously, just sit in a dusty library all the time and not do shit?”

“Yes-” Clarke starts, but Lincoln speaks over her.

“You can hang out with me,” he says, voice soft and gentle. “When you get bored with researching. I’ll take you where other demons and vampires hang out, the ones who try to stay on the Slayer’s good side. You can make some friends there.”

“Really?” Octavia asks, face brightening as she looks up at Lincoln. 

“Of course,” Lincoln says and smiles so warmly at her that Clarke drops her eyes. Lincoln’s kindness extends past her own and it’s painful to be reminded of that.

“Hold on,” Blake says, “I don’t know about that.”

“Seriously, Bellamy?” Octavia snaps. “Stop being so fucking protective! You said that this was a chance for us to start over- and starting over means that I get to have friends and spend time with people who aren’t just you!”

Blake winces and opens his mouth like he wants to argue with her, but then just shakes his head. For the second time that morning, Clarke watches him cave to Octavia. There’s an exhaustion in his face, a loneliness and sadness that Clarke doesn’t want to recognize, but does. She turns her head away before he can catch her watching him. She doesn’t want to sympathize with him. She doesn’t want to feel anything for him. 

“So it’s settled,” she says brusquely.

“Where will they stay?” Monty asks suddenly and Clarke falters, She hadn’t thought that through. 

“Here,” Kane says immediately. “With me.”

“Oh, no- Kane,” Clarke begins to protest. She doesn’t like the thought of leaving Octavia and Blake with her Watcher, sets a tingle of fear down her spine that makes her shiver.

“I have two spare rooms, and my room is warded. It’ll be fine, if you trust them, as you say you do,” Kane says and Clarke suddenly feels fear rise in her chest.

Yes, she trusts Blake to the extent that he’s angry and alone like she is, that he’s trying to get his sister’s soul back with the same single minded intensity that’s been driving Clarke toward her death for the past five years; that this is a way to punish Kane and do something “good”. 

But to trust Kane’s life in Blake’s hands makes Clarke panic and she stares at her Watcher, unsure how to argue without backing herself into a corner that undoes all the rational she’s tried to imbue this decision with. Because when it comes down to it, she knows she’s taking a huge risk, she knows she’s gambling because she’s hurt and angrier than she can remember being in her life, and Blake and Octavia are the easiest, most extreme rebellion she has at her disposal.

“It’s okay, Clarke,” Kane says gently, and Clarke suddenly realizes he understands exactly what she’s done, the distance she’s tried to put between them, the intensity with which she’s desperately trying to push him away. “I won’t be going anywhere.”

It’s a reassurance that he trusts this move, that he trusts that she’s made the right call here, but also, despite her push, her rejection, Kane’s going to stay. He won’t leave her, even when she can’t express to him that she needs him to stay. Clarke gives him a slow nod.

“Alright. If you think that’s the best option,” she says as generously as she can. When Kane nods she rolls her shoulders and straightens. “Ok. Are we all good with that?”

She looks around the kitchen at her friends: at Raven leaning forward with her chin propped in her hand, looking annoyed but willing to see out this endeavor; Monty, quiet but sure of her, Lincoln, giving her an all too knowing look; Octavia, head cocked with a dark wanting and Blake… who isn’t looking at her, isn’t looking at any of them, a hard clench to his jaw. One by one, they give their assent, Blake the last to, just a brief, sharp nod of his head and Clarke takes a breath.

“In that case…” She doesn’t even finish the thought before she’s pushed herself up and off the counter, moving across the kitchen and down the hall, ignoring Monty’s inquiry, and out the front door. She walks… she walks without intention or knowledge of where she’s going, her feet carrying her across sun warmed pavement, the smell of drying, dying leaves in the air, filling her nose.

She feels as if she stops walking, she won’t ever be able to start again.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yooooo.... I'm actually still alive and I'm actually still writing this fic. Surprise?
> 
> Thanks to my betas, cetaprincipessa and storyskein for their always fabulous help.

Clarke comes to, thinks she comes to, isn’t sure but her feet hurt and she has no idea what time it is, on one of the campus benches outside the library. 

She’s sitting with her knees pulled up and tucked under her chin, fingers loosely curled into the cuffs of her jeans. She’s not sure, at first, why she’s looking up expectantly, but then she sees Niylah, lingering just a few feet away, her backpack slung over her shoulder, a textbook in one arm and looking already like she’s regretting calling attention to herself. She’s already half turned back toward the library. 

Clarke can’t blame her, she’s in yesterday’s clothes and her hair must be a wild mess. No make up, eyes probably red, blood on her knuckles… jesus. But Niylah just smiles at her when Clarke meets her eyes and turns back towards her. “Hey, Clarke.”

Her voice is so soft and Clarke suddenly aches for that voice to keep saying her name without knowing all the pain and suffering that her name holds. She needs Niylah to draw the poison from inside her and make her feel better. Clarke musters up a smile and lets her legs flop off the bench, practiced nonchalance coming easy. “Hey, Niylah.”

“You alright?” Niylah asks, always so kind. 

“Oh yeah. Just…. Long night?” she offers and winces because that sounds like she was out messing around and that’s not the angle she’s working right now. 

“Oh really?” Niylah asks. “Raven said you were being lame. I saw her, last night at Nyko’s party?”

“Would you believe me if I said studying got the better of me?” Clarke tries for the lame joke which is a half truth and Niylah does laugh at that.

“You, Clarke Griffin? You’ve copied my notes for biology three times.”

“Sure, but,” Clarke tries, reaching out to knock her scuffed boot into Niylah’s striped Toms. “That was just an excuse to hang out with you.”

Niylah looks like she’s fighting down a smile and Clarke leans forward and cocks her head up. “You doing work right now?”

“I am. Headed to the library with-” she nods vaguely over her shoulder to where two of her friends are waiting at the library’s ramp, looking mildly impatient. Clarke doesn’t blame them, she doesn’t know why Niylah puts up with her either. “You probably got caught up on all your work if you were studying last night,” Niylah says, a little challengingly and Clarke will give her that.

“Sure, but I could always use a pop quiz.” 

Niylah presses her lips together but she doesn’t invite Clarke to join her at the library. 

Clarke follows her home instead and presses her up against her dorm room door as soon as they get inside, up close against her back and kissing her neck, keeping her hands that are still shaking gentle on Niylah’s sides. 

See? She thinks as she rucks up Niylahs’ shirt so she can palm her stomach as she works her other hand into Niylah’s jeans and Niylah makes a soft, happy sound, see? Clarke can be gentle. She’s still human. She makes people feel good.

She rubs at Niylah’s clit fast and hard, listens to her gasp and noses behind her ear, nipping. Niylah gets squirmy, trembling with it all, but Clarke doesn’t let up on her, holds her still with just a little more strength than she usually uses with Niylah, makes her take Clarke’s fingers until she comes with a gasp.

“Yeah?” Clarke breathes against her. “Did you like that?”

Niylah laughs breathlessly, her forehead leaned against the door. “You’re always so forceful, Clarke Griffin. Sometime you have to let me show you how fun going slow can be.”

_I’m not capable of that_ , Clarke thinks a little wildly but just kisses Niylah’s neck again. “Want another one?”

She gets Niylah to lean back in her desk chair and goes down on her. And when Niylah insists on reciprocating, Clarke lets her guide her back on the bed and tug her jeans down. Niylah tries to be gentle and slow with her, tries to tease her with soft licks and kisses and Clarke has to close her eyes because it’s too jarring to have this gentleness. She can’t get Blake’s dark, angry eyes out of her head, can’t get Raven’s incredulous voice or Monty’s silent skepticism to stop ringing in her ears, she can’t get past the hollow feeling in her chest about the last four years of her life being a lie. 

She feels like shit, and she fakes her orgasm in the end. When Niylah comes up to kiss her, Clarke can only stand a few moments of her soft, wet lips before she has to tap out and turn her head away.

“See? Not so bad, right?” Niylah asks her and Clarke hums.

“That was fun,” Clare says, and lets Niylah flop down next to her and chat to her a little, giving noncommittal answers until Niylah reaches for her laptop and pulls up a show for them to watch. Clarke lets Niylah intertwine their fingers for a while until it gets to be too much and she pushes herself up from Niylah’s bed.

“Oh. You going?” Niylah asks, propping herself up, looking beautiful on her red sheets, but Clarke can’t take it. She’s too exhausted and too antsy to fall asleep here. It would be too much, too unfair to Niylah to pass out in her bed and wake up with her nightmares. 

“Yeah, I have plans,” Clarke says and Niylah’s face darkens ever so slightly.

“Right, like you always do,” Niylah says and reaches to pull on her bra. 

“Sorry,” Clarke says. “I’m… sorry.”

“One of these days, Clarke,” Niylah says, pulling on a pretty robe that hangs over her bed side and standing up to lean against her desk while Clarke pulls on her black hoodie. “I’ll know better than to think you’ll want to stay after.”

“I do,” Clarke says, a little desperately because she _does_ , she likes Niylah, likes how sweet she is but she has no idea how to be nice back when all she wants to do is claw her way out of her own body. She can’t let Niylah close when being close to Clarke means danger and death and loss. She can’t bring that into Niylah’s life. “I just… don’t know how to.”

It’s the most honest she’s ever managed to be, and she’s not sure if it’s because of her exhaustion or loneliness or how bad she feels about making Niylah feel unwanted. Maybe it’s a mix of all three. 

“You’re a mess,” Niylah says, but it’s not unkind. She considers Clarke a moment longer and then crosses to her and cups Clarke’s jaw in her hand and kisses her, just a light brush of lips. “I’ll see you around, I’m sure.”

“Okay,” Clarke agrees and doesn’t remember leaving Niylah’s room.

Clarke feels like she’s drifting, comes to again with her hand on the door to her own house and freezes for a moment. She doesn’t really want to be here, not with how she left so suddenly this morning. She knows that was stupid, and she almost can’t bear to face Raven, but she’s so tired. She feels like she hasn’t slept in weeks and her instincts are kicking in, the Slayer inside her guiding her home to a safe place to rest. 

She tries to close the door as quietly as she can behind her but Raven’s always had insane hearing. Clarke blames it on her demon hunter training: twigs snapping; the shift of air in confined, dark spaces; silence when there should be noise. Raven’s trained herself to be a natural predator that Clarke was born to be. 

 

“Clarke? Is that you?” Raven sticks her head out of the kitchen where Clarke can smell something spicy and mouth watering on the stove, sauce and herbs and some kind of meat frying. It makes her stomach roll. 

“I’m making dinner,” Raven says in the voice Clarke recognizes being tinged with false brightness. “Come have some.”

“I’m good,” Clarke says, shrugging out of her hoodie and leaving it on the stair railing. “Thanks I’m just… I’m not hungry.”

Raven’s expression shifts, hardening even as her smile settles in place. “Join me anyway.”

“I’m really tired, Raven,” Clarke tries but Raven’s already turning with as much of an end of discussion whirl as she can with the brace on her leg and returning into the kitchen.

Clarke lingers for a moment, trying to decide if she can get away with sneaking up to her room but decides against it. There’s a fissure of tension in the air, something broken open in the peace of their home that Clarke was so sure she had preserved. With a last, helpless glance up the stairs, at the bathroom where she could finally get clean, the bed that promised her a break for a little while, Clarke follows Raven into the kitchen and perches on a stool at the counter. 

Raven’s back is to her and Clarke finds herself staring at the pattern in the faux-granite top, black squiggly lines that swim in Clarke’s exhausted vision. 

“So you took off pretty quickly this morning,” Raven says, her back still toward Clarke and voice overly cheerful. “That was a pretty good rally speech though.”

“Yeah,” Clarke tries, no real excuse coming to her. She knows it was stupid, knows deep in her bones and in the guilt that rolls her stomach, that the fragile truce she and Blake forged could have crumbled the moment she left, could have resulted in a blood bath. She tries to imagine the devastation, of blood dripping from Blake’s claws and Octavia with blood smeared across her chin as she grins. There’s the abstract horror of it, but mostly Clarke just feels hollow and has to resist leaning forward to rest her head against the cool countertop. She’s so tired of not feeling. “Sorry about that,” is all she can manage.

Raven chuckles, light. “Is that all you have to say, Clarke?” She turns around so she’s leaning back against the stove, her hands braced on the thin edge of it. 

“Was everything okay after I left?” Clarke asks tentatively. “Blake kept his word, didn’t he?”

“Oh sure,” Raven says, impatient. “Yeah, Clarke. In fact we all joined hands and sang kumbaya and your vampire and demon renounced blood, repented for their sins and Lincoln could walk in sunlight. You should have been there, Clarke. It was stellar.”

“I shouldn’t have left,” Clarke tries. “I know that, but it _was_ okay, wasn’t it?”

Raven makes a frustrated noise in the back of her throat. “I mean, yeah Clarke. Everyone’s still breathing, your boy pretty much locked himself in the room upstairs and Kane sent me home. But come on, Clarke! What the fuck happened this morning?”

“I told you. The Council is responsible for Octavia being turned, and it’s our job-”

“‘Our job’?” Raven asks coolly. “My job, Clarke, is actually in the profession of killing demons, and yours is protecting humankind, not granting free passes to whichever demon of the week strikes your fancy.”

“I’m not granting free passes,” Clarke protests. “It’s the right thing to do.”

“Clarke,” Raven snaps. “I cleaned you up not two nights ago, I reset your shoulder when this demon and vampire attacked you. Whoever Octavia was before she was turned, she’s not that girl anymore. And your demon, Bellamy. He may still have his soul, but Clarke, is it a soul worth saving?”

Clarke shakes her head, scratching her nails lightly against the counter, fighting against the exhaustion and grey haze that feels like it’s the only thing in her brain. She can’t explain this to Raven, other than the gut feeling that she needed to make this call. That if she can do this, it may just begin to counteract all the blood and dust she’s soaked in. That maybe her legacy will be more than death. 

All she can say, though, is, “I made what I thought was the right call.”

“Yeah, I figured that. But, Clarke, you could have, I don’t know, let me know sooner?”

“I told you that the situation had changed.”

“Right, and that covers all of it, doesn’t it?”

“What do you want me say, Raven?” Clarke asks, tired and just wanting to make peace, but from the way Raven’s face goes dark, it’s clearly the wrong thing.

“How about an explanation for what the fuck has been going on with you lately? How about a reassurance, any reassurance, that what you promised me when Finn left is still true?”

“All of that still holds true,” Clarke says. “You’re smarter than Kane and myself combined, and I still want to know what you think, but that doesn’t apply when the situation doesn’t involve you. You have to trust me on this, Raven.” 

Clarke can’t bring herself to tell Raven the whole truth, the bitter dark feeling of kinship she feels toward the Blakes. That if the situation had been ever so slightly different, she would be dead and Octavia could have been the Slayer. It could be so easy to say, but a deep, sickening shame curls in Clarke’s stomach and she can’t speak the words aloud. They’re too close to home, too vulnerable and ugly, too true to the fact that Clarke already feels like enough of a monster without thinking that a twist of fate could have left her as such, a demon traded for the feral power of the Slayer in her chest. 

“Trust you?” Raven snaps, slapping her hand down on the stove. “Clarke, I’ve been with you for the past three years, by any standard you’re the best friend I’ve got. I’ve trusted you with my life, countless times, but lately? I don’t know where your head is. I mean, have either of them shown the slightest bit of remorse?” 

_They can’t afford to_ , Clarke thinks without really knowing where it comes from. But she knows, deeply, personally, how true that feels. “All I know is that Blake’s hand was forced,” Clarke manages. “There are shades of grey in this, Raven.”

“Shades of Grey? What the fuck, Clarke, are you E.L. James now? Our job is to kill demons and vampires, not consider if they got fucked over an acceptable amount of times for us to consider them trauma victims.”

“Blake still has a soul, Raven! He may be a demon but there’s-”

“Don’t tell me there’s good in him. Don’t go there Clarke,” Raven all but snarls. “You know who had good in him? Finn. And where did that end? Finn’s up somewhere in Canada, because you deemed him too unsafe and volatile to be around people. And what about Maya? Dusted. Like she should have been, because, oh yeah, she was a vampire.

“And you knew them, Clarke, you knew how good they were, when it wasn’t a full moon, before Maya was turned... What makes the Blake siblings so special that’s got you turning your back on your friends for them?”

“Turning my back? Raven, I’m right here. I haven’t gone anywhere, but you know what?” Clarke growls, feeling anger burn hot and bright in her, a shock of feeling that leaves her hands shaking as it leaps through her. 

“You chose to do this with your life. You chose it ok? I never had _any_ choice, I was never asked, never consulted or given an out, but I am doing the best I can. I’m trying all the time, but I’m sorry if that’s not good enough for you or Lincoln.”

“Bullshit about being good enough. Bullshit, Clarke,” Raven half-shouts back. “All I’m asking is that you let me in. I’m right here, I just want my friend.”

“Well this is what you’ve got,” Clarke says, voice cutting. “I am the Slayer, Raven. This is who I’ve always been. You can be hurt by that, or you can accept that. I’m sorry this isn’t the buddy adventure you thought you’d get signing on with me, but at the end of the day, I make the calls, and you have to accept that.” 

Raven stares at Clarke and then turns around jerkily and braces herself against the stove. The pan of whatever-she's-making is smoking and Raven turns off the stove with a snap of her wrist. There’s hurt and frustration welling in Clarke’s chest and she hates how angry that makes her feel. It’s too similar to what Lincoln said the night before, too close to home when it’s Raven who says it, Raven whom she’s tried so hard to protect from seeing how empty Clarke is. She’s tried so hard, why isn’t that good enough anymore? 

She wants to reach out to Raven, to apologize, to explain, but she shies away from it. Explaining means Raven sees the dark, ugly thing that’s left in her chest, and, Clarke thinks, if Raven sees it, the last vestiges of the girl she was, the memories her friends hold, will be gone. If those memories are proven false, did that girl ever really exist.

“I’m… going to bed,” Clarke says, not being able to stand being in the kitchen any more and Raven makes a noise, scrubs a hand across the back of her face and Clarke thinks it may come away wet. 

“At least take a plate,” she says. “You look like shit.”

Upstairs in her room, Clarke manages to choke down about half of the food Raven’s given her. It’s rich and hearty and by any definition of the word, delicious, but it makes Clarke’s stomach roll. She can hear the pointed silence downstairs, and then sometime later, time which Clarke has passed staring at her ceiling when she should should have been asleep, she hears Raven on the stairs and the soft open and close of her bedroom door. 

She wonders as sleep swarms up her spine and settles in her brain, if after everything, she’s lost Raven too.

Morning comes with a rattle of wind against her window pains and Clarke finds herself sitting up in bed, stake in hand before she’s even fully awake. She’s half bleary with sleep and has to shake her head a few times before the memory of the past two days comes back to her. _Shit_.

Raven’s in the bathroom when Clarke knocks lightly on the door and it swings up on Raven washing her face, sweatshirt bunched at her elbows.

“Hey,” Raven says, voice a little tight. “Sleep alright?”

“Yeah,” Clarke answers, glancing at Raven before she perches on the toilet and combs her fingers through her hair as she relieves herself. Her hair remains a mess. “Did you?”

“Fine.” Raven’s voice is wooden and Clarke’s chest aches. “You should shower.”

“Don’t I know it,” Clarke tries for some humor, sleep having helped her find a slightly better balance in her facade, but it falls flat, clearly, after last night and Raven just presses her lips together and leaves her to it. 

Clarke tries again downstairs, tentative as Raven just glances at her and then pushes a bowl and cereal and milk in her direction. “Are you working on anything interesting today?”

“Just…” Raven trails off as she looks at Clarke and then sighs and shakes her head. “Just tinkering with an old lantern. Are we just… moving forward?”

“I-” Clarke starts but her phone rings, then, shrill and sharp with Kane’s ringtone, and as much as Clarke hates herself for feeling it, it’s a relief to be spared answering that question. 

“I should…” she says, gesturing, and Raven nods. 

“Go for it.”

Clarke grabs her phone and steps out of the kitchen, not particularly wanting to listen to whatever Kane has to say while under Raven’s eyes. Raven would know, just looking at her face, just listening to her voice, that this relationship is fucked up too. The hallway is safer, and Clarke leans back against the wall as she drags her thumb across the screen. “Yeah?” 

“Hi.” A short voice says awkwardly on the other end of the line. “Uh. It’s Bellamy. Blake.” Blake says it like he’s forgotten polite phone etiquette and Clarke blinks, a little surprised to hear the demon’s voice through her phone.

“Oh. Hello,” she says and can’t think of anything else to say. There’s an awkward silence and then Blake clears his throat.

“You said I could use the library,” Blake finally supplies. “I want to. Today.”

“A ‘please’ is usually customary and polite when asking for favors,” Clarke says dryly because she doesn’t particularly feel like making it easy on Blake and his annoyed breath on the other end is a little like a victory.

“You already agreed to help me,” Blake snaps. 

“To help Octavia,” Clarke can’t help but correct him but just shakes her head at herself when she can hear the silence bristle between them. “You’re still at Kane’s?”

“Yes,” Blake says, bitten off and frustrated. 

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Kane keeps his keys for the library on the table by the door. Meet me on the porch.” She hangs up before Blake can agree and leans her head back against the wall, takes a slow breath. 

“You out?” Raven asks, appearing in the doorway, leaning against the frame and considering Clarke with her arms crossed.

“Yeah,” Clarke says, looking back down at her dark screen before tucking it into her pockets. “Yeah. I’m going to take Blake over to the library. The sooner we get this all done, the sooner we get rid of them.”

She pulls up a grin for Raven but her friend only manages a slight, crooked smile that lacks certainty, doesn’t touch any other part of her face. “Sounds good.”

Blake’s crouching, not sitting like a normal person, but crouching on Kane’s porch, forearms resting against his thighs. He’s wearing the same black, leather jacket Clarke’s yet to see him without. His shirt is new though, instead of the grey one she had last seen him in, drenched in sweat, Blake’s changed into a blue henley. 

He straightens when he sees her, pushing himself up to his full height, looking almost as if he’s guarding the house from her, planted solidly between Clarke and the front door. Clarke doesn’t like the way it makes her gut twist, like she’s the threat. Clarke stops half way up the short walk way, hands in her pockets as they consider each other for a moment.

“Keys?” Clarke asks and Blake lazily lifts his hand, the library key ring dangling from his finger. He’s still for a moment before with a sudden snap of his wrist, the keys come flying at Clarke, fast and aimed at her forehead. Clarke snatches them out of the air and tucks them into her pocket smoothly. She lifts an eyebrow at Blake, who just cocks an unimpressed eyebrow. Great.

“Satisfied I’m still the Slayer?” Clarke asks, turning her back on Blake and starting back down the path. There’s silence behind her and then the soft crunch of feet on the gravel and Blake is just a half step behind her. He moves so quickly, Clarke reminds herself, she needs to expect that from him. “Or was that just your version of a friendly ‘Good Morning?’”

“Better wake up than coffee,” Blake says, but Clarke can hear the dissent in his voice. There’s a fine tension between them, a live wire that Blake’s trying to get her to tap, provoke, but Clarke won’t give him the satisfaction. She resists snarking back and lets the silence lie between them so that Blake shakes his head after a moment, a tetchy little sigh huffed out, and slides his hands into his pockets. Somehow, he manages to make silence sound querulous. 

The silence deepens between them as they walk, prematurely dry leaves crunching under Clarke’s keds and Blake’s thick boots. It’s the first truly chilly day of autumn, sky bleakly grey and the wind whipping through the trees, making the branches creak against each other and the leaves shush Clarke and Blake unnecessarily as they walk underneath. Clarke tucks her face into her chunky scarf and studies out of habit the way Blake tucks his chin and rolls his shoulders up, bracing against the chill that must seep through his shirt, but not even bothering to zip up his jacket.

Blake looks a little more alert when they reach campus and Clarke keeps a careful eye on him as she skirts them around the edges, not trusting Blake to take him the most direct path to the old library. Somehow a busy, cheerful student body doesn’t seem like the ideal place to test Blake’s self restraint for the first time. She watches him as he lifts his head to study a laughing group of underclassmen, laughing and all carrying hot cups for autumnal drinks that make Clarke’s own fingers ache for something warm to hold.

“Don’t get any ideas,” Clarke warns him preemptively and Blake gives her a short, hard look. 

“For getting pumpkin spice lattes?” He mutters tersely. “Thanks, I think I can avoid that sugar headache now that you’ve warned me off of smelling it in the air.”

“You can smell that all the way from here?” Clarke asked, a little surprised and Blake shrugs.

“When it’s that full of chemicals and glycerin?” Blake asks like it’s the most noxious thing in the world, glancing at her like she’d be crazy to think otherwise and it surprises a snort out of Clarke. “What?”

“You sound like my mother,” Clarke finds herself saying. “Were you a health nut?”

“Were?” Blake scoffs at the past tense. “I’m not dead, Slayer.”

“Do demons practice healthy eating habits?” Clarke can’t help but mock back. “Which has more nutrients, I wonder, children’s intestines or virgin’s brains?”

“Generally it’s recommended by most communities to get a healthy dose of Slayer heart,” Blake says and Clarke rolls her eyes.

“Chilling,” she deadpans.

“So, if anyone asks,” Clarke says as she fights to unlock the door to the Art Library. “You’re a grad student. Doing research.”

“Got it,” Blake says, leaning back against the stone wall, waiting for Clarke to manage to jiggle the key just right so that the lock turns. “You sure you’ve done this before?” 

“It’s a catch,” Clarke snaps a little tersely as she sees Blake’s skeptical eyebrow. She’s going to come to hate that eyebrow lift, she can tell already. “You gotta… yeah, told you,” she says as the key slides just right and the lock turns over with a grumble. “Just have to learn the trick to it.”

She holds open the heavy door for him. “You shouldn’t run into any students, most don’t come here. But if you get any lost art majors, all the actual textbooks are in the Main Library. Oh- and the library has lost all copies of _Renoir in the Twentieth-Century_. It’s a long story: a ghost, a portal to hell… essentially they’re gone but. Don’t mention that.”

“No books about Renoir, noted,” Blake mutters, following her into the library and letting the door swing heavily shut behind him. Clarke stalls by flipping on the old light switch, the one that makes the lights flicker on a bit like a horror movie, trying not feel like bringing Blake here is a betrayal to what the library has always been. She takes a breath and nods with her head toward the big table and Blake follows her to it and sets down the surprisingly trendy bag he’s had slung over his shoulder. 

“So- basic books about demons and demonology are up on the left,” Clarke says, pointing up at the loft, “and on the right, you’ve got your more obscure texts. Rituals, deities, apocalyptic predictions, you know how it goes… ” she says with a vague flip of her wrist. “I assume you know what you’re looking for.”

Blake looks up at the towering bookshelves. “I’ll know when I find it,” he says and then without another word to Clarke, bounds up the stairs and stops at the first bookshelf, pulling out a book at random and smoothing his hand over the cover.

“Ok?” Clarke prompts, not wanting to linger in the dusty, dark room that holds so much of Kane’s presence for her. 

Blake looks back down at her, like he’s forgotten she was still there. “Yeah, ok,” he agrees. As Clarke turns to leave him, he adds, “I never had this many books.”

“Well,” Clarke says, turning to face him as she continues to back towards the door. “Congrats, the library’s yours.”

“Huh,” Blake hums, almost too soft to hear and he looks up at the stacks and stacks of books, his expression the lightest Clarke’s seen it. “Thanks, Clarke.”

“You got it,” Clarke says and then escapes into the sunlight. 

The next few weeks feel like they pass in a haze for Clarke. For the most part, it’s the regular demons and vampires, she hits and kicks and dusts and slays her way through them mostly without a scratch.

Raven’s tip about the teenage vampire turns out to be accurate: there’s a kid hanging around college parties and a slew of missing freshman girls. Clarke finds him in a back alley way and he turns to dust on the end of her stake, his face snarling and hands reaching for her. 

A few nights later she kills some sort of swamp demon, alien in its features, and it leaves her covered in slimy, green ooze that must be blood. It’s water resistant and Clarke spends at least two hours in the tub scrubbing down furiously, staining her washcloth a permanent greenish black and leaving the bathroom smelling a bit like sewage.

At home, she and Raven seem to have settled on a tentative peace, but there’s silence where there used to be Raven’s laughter and easy voice in their kitchen. Clarke tries to make up for it by trying to find things to talk to Raven about, but even after a few minutes of talking, Clarke finds, inevitably one of them falls silent. Their fight weighs heavy between them, Raven hurt and Clarke unsure how to broach the subject without revealing too much, so she compensates by spending more time out of the house on patrol. She does her homework on top of the Wallace mausoleum and drops down into several unsuspecting gangs of vampires, goes home late when Raven’s already gone up to her room.

She performs some good samaritan duties and rescues a cat from a tree and finds a lost little girl, red haired and no more than twelve, who Clarke walks back to her neighborhood. The girl’s name, she finds out, is Charlotte, and she holds Clarke’s hand, grasping like Clarke’s a lifeline. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, being trusted so implicitly. 

As much as she can, she avoids Kane’s house, but she can’t avoid the library. She knows, now, from the odd hours that she’s dropped in to do her own research, that Blake spends the majority of his time there, sometimes with Octavia, but often without. Mostly, it’s an intimidation factor, Clarke letting Blake feel her presence, let him know that she knows what’s going on with him, and for the sake of presenting a mostly undivided front, exchanges small talk with Kane. If Blake thinks she’s on the outs with her Watcher, even more so than what she had let him see on Saturday night, well… she doesn’t trust him or Octavia with that information.

It seems, though, that Kane and the Blakes are coexisting just fine. Blake keeps to himself when he’s not at the library, retreating to the room Kane’s given him with books he’s brought home to study into the night. Octavia appears to be behaving herself as well. She grumbles about having to drink pig’s blood loudly within Kane’s hearing, but does anyway. As long as they’re playing nice, Clarke can manage to as well.

Blake is camped out at the big table, when Clarke comes in one morning, sore and exhausted after a nearly sleepless night of trying to track down a demon that turned into a swarm of bees when she’d tried to kill him the night before. Clarke’s been stung in at least four places, and hasn’t had enough coffee to justify being awake after only getting three hours of sleep after spending the rest of the night looking for him. 

Blake looks up from the pages of notes he has spread out on the table in front of him when Clarke sets her backpack down heavily on the table and drops into a chair. “Slayer,” he greets her, in his usual gruff way and Clarke gives him a nod. Kane appears at his office door, mug of tea in hand and watching Clarke carefully. 

“How was patrol last night?” Kane asks lightly. 

“Alright,” Clarke tries as she cranes her neck to read the closest of Blake’s notes. His handwriting is small and cramped, like he’s afraid he’s going to run out of room on the page, and Clarke is too tired to try to decipher it. A soft hiss makes her look up and Octavia crouches on top of one of the shelves on the second level, face morphed and watching Clarke like a predator. “Terrifying,” Clarke tells her blandly, and Octavia grins and shifts so that her eyes glow as light reflects back off her retinas.

“O,” Blake says. “Knock it off.”

“I wasn’t doing anything,” Octavia grumbles as she hops off the bookcase and leans over the rail. Her face shifts back into one of a sixteen year old and she smiles at Clarke, sweet. “I’m bored.”

“You’re too smart to be bored,” Blake says, and it sounds like something he’s said a lot, not even looking up at his sister anymore and back to studying his notes. “If you want something to do, come help me with this.”

Octavia makes a face. “Why can’t I spend time with Lincoln today?”

“Because I said so,” Blake says, and there’s a low growl in his throat. 

“Because,” Kane says, lifting a hand as if to mollify children. “Lincoln’s doing me a favor today, and sometimes just one vampire is better than two.”

Clarke looks up at Kane, curious despite herself and Kane mouths _Jasper_ at her. Clarke looks back down quickly, guilt twisting her stomach. Of course. 

“Clarke, did you need help with something?” Kane asks her, voice careful but kind. God, she hates that he sounds so kind when she’s so mad at him, so mad at herself for trusting him, for not trusting him now.

“Yeah, I had a run in with some sort of demon that turned into bees when I tried to kill him. You haven’t heard of anything like that before, have you?”

Kane cocks his head, frowning and already turning back into his office to presumably get some books when Blake looks up suddenly. “I have.”

“You have,” Clarke repeats, a little skeptical, because Blake always stays quiet when she’s in the library. “Really.”

“Really,” Blake says, annoyed. “I remember researching it, back when I was still training to be a Watcher. It’s a type of Plains Demon.”

“What’s a Plains Demon doing in Northern Virginia?” Clarke asks, leaning back in her chair and dragging her hand through her hair.

Blake shrugs but is already standing up and heading for the stairs. “They’re nomadic. They used to only be found in Northern America, but… I think they’re pretty common everywhere except Russia these days.”

“Is it because Russia is endless winter and really really cold?” Clarke asks and Blake actually huffs something that sounds like it could be amused. 

“Maybe, Slayer. I haven’t asked them personally.” He’s scanning the shelves of books, then reaches up and pulls out a larger book and flips through it before bringing it back down and setting it on the table in front of Clarke. “See? Plains Demon.”

Kane comes to look over Clarke’s shoulder as well as she tries to make her tired eyes focus and read the small print. “Looks like they prefer to be in areas with access to water, prey and foraging for when they’re in instinct form,” Kane summarizes as he reads.

“There’s some caveat that they can only remain in insect or demon form for so long,” Blake says, dropping back down in his chair and bracing his arms on his thighs. “But they prefer insect swarms because they aren’t particularly strong fighters.”

“So I have to corner him in a place that would allow me to keep him from changing form. Or…” Clarke says, trailing off, and Blake nods, picking up her trail of thought.

“Or you have to make sure he exhausts himself in insect form before you corner him.”

“That’s a thought,” Kane says, moving to lean against the back of the chair across from Blake. “And,” he says, jutting his chin at the book, “the demon should be pretty easily killed once you do. It’s got an exoskeleton like most insects, even in humanoid form.”

Clarke makes a face. “So I should smush him, is what you’re saying. Splat.” She slaps her hand on the table lightly for emphasis. “Great, more demon guts.” 

The door to the library swings open then, and Clarke scrambles to close the big book in front of her and glancing over her shoulder at Octavia, to make sure she’s behaving just in case it’s a student, but it’s just Monty, his face drawn.

“Hey, you okay?” Clarke asks, standing up.

Monty shakes his head. “There’s a girl missing from my Stats class. A freshman named Fox.”

“A freshman missing from class?” Blake asks, dismissive. “Sounds like she’s skipping. Think horses, not zebras when you hear hoofbeats.”

“Not in a place like Arkville,” Clarke says darkly.

“Not with a student like Fox,” Monty says, not even bothering to look at Blake. “She had a presentation today, and she’s the type of student who wouldn’t just flake out on it.”

“Ok,” Clarke says. “Did you talk to any of her friends? Other people who know her?”

“There’s a girl, Harper, who knows her. She saw her last on Saturday night, before she went out. But not since.”

“Ok,” Clarke decides. “I’ll see what I can do about Fox. And this bug demon. Looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and Kudos are always appreciated <3
> 
> I'm hanging on [here](http://verbam.tumblr.com/)!
> 
> (again, sorry for the update lag time. The next chapter will not take as long, promises and kisses)


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The thing about being the Slayer and trying to research disappearances is that it makes Clarke feel like a creep. Researching demons is a lot less awkward and a lot more routine- slip a George R. R. Martin book jacket over One Thousand Common Demons, and Clarke is set. However, being the girl who consistently shows up at the homes and dorm rooms of missing students and has been caught (twice now) coming out of a manhole cover by classmates makes Clarke pretty sure she’s earned a rap as a Grade A weirdo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is dedicated to @mego42/ms_scarlet as a belated birthday present and a thank you for the amazing photosets she's made for Do Not Go Gentle. Happy (late) birthday chica.
> 
> Thank you, as always, for the comments and kudos! Always so great to hear your thought and predictions. Many of you are very clever. I love it!!
> 
> And thank you to my excellent betas, @raincityruckus and @cetaprincipessa.

With Lincoln on the trail of the Plains Demon, Clarke gets the lucky task of tracking down any students who might have a better idea of what happened to Fox. 

The thing about being the Slayer and trying to research disappearances is that it makes Clarke feel like a creep. Researching demons is a lot less awkward and a lot more routine- slip a George R. R. Martin book jacket over _One Thousand Common Demons_ , and Clarke is set. However, being the girl who consistently shows up at the homes and dorm rooms of missing students and has been caught (twice now) coming out of a manhole cover by classmates makes Clarke pretty sure she’s earned a rap as a Grade A weirdo.

Monty gives her an in, this time. After finding Harper on facebook and then instagram the next day, Clarke manages to figure out where she can find her pretty quickly. She stalks Harper from the academic buildings to the local campus cafe, trailing her with her hands stuffed in her pockets and a green beanie pulled down low over her face, her hair tucked up. There’s something about settling into a mission, as Kane used to call her longer Slayer assignments, something that focuses her and soothes her, settles her in her body. It pushes the hurt, the anger, the fear back so all that’s left in sharp eyed focus, a certain clarity to what she needs to get done. 

She gives Harper about half an hour to get settled inside DripShot Cafe. She pretends to smoke a cigarette from the pack she keeps on her for just this occasion and settles deeper into her body. She’s always been good with people - at reading people, anyway - figuring out what makes them tick. She’s found that being the Slayer hones those instincts. Clarke pulls up the memories of the girl she used to be: bright, friendly, inquisitive and layers them onto her, covering up the stripped, skeletal remains that six years of being the Slayer has left her with. When it feels secure, wrapped intimately around her, she tamps out the cigarette and ducks inside. 

DripShot is always busy in afternoons- students studying between classes, or meeting professors and friends for a hot drink. Townies and professors alike stake out corner tables territorially and Clarke recognizes her freshman history professor reading his newspaper, lifted so that it completely blocks out the rest of the cafe. Harper has found a small, two seater table by the windows in the back, her laptop and a few books open on the table in front of her, clearly focused on her work. Clarke hops in the drink line, ordering a latte and then lingering just long enough that she doesn’t seem too obvious when she gets naturally buffeted over to Harper’s table.

“Hey, you’re Harper, right?” Clarke asks, cocking her hip into the small table to lean out of the way of the harried looking barista pushing past with an overflowing bin of dirty mugs and plates. The screech of the espresso grinder and the growl of the steaming milk, as well as the bubbling, restless energy of all the cafe patrons make Clarke raise her voice.

Harper looks up, brushing her hair behind one ear and smiling politely, if a little distantly. “Yeah?”

Clarke gestures half heartedly around the cafe. “I’m Clarke, Monty’s friend. Do you mind if I sit with you? I was idiot and ordered my latte for here.”

“Oh! Sure!” Harper says, with a sudden smile lighting up her face and she shifts some of her books over to make room for Clarke to plop down in the seat across from her and take out her work. “Of course. It’s nice to finally meet you,” Harper says, with a pretty smile. 

“You too,” Clarke says as she pulls out her notebook, calculator and math textbook and preoccupies herself with finding the right chapter. She settles her things and flashes Harper a grateful smile. Harper grins back like they’re already friends. “I can’t believe we haven’t met yet,” she tries and Harper nods.

“I know,” Harper says, leaning forward, looking pleased by Clarke’s friendliness but self assured. “Monty talks about how great you are, but somehow he’s never gotten his act together to get us to hang out altogether. But that’s Monty for you, right? He likes to keep his friends separate.”

“Don’t I know it,” Clarke says easily, not revealing the pang that she feels at not having known Monty _had_ friends outside of Jasper and herself and Raven. But it’s been over six months since Jasper has stopped talking to any of them. Of course Monty’s made new friends. “Those conflicting schedules, right?” It gives Harper leeway to keep going and Harper takes it.

“Outside of class, I usually just see Monty at parties with that girl, Raven,” Harper chats easily. “I’ve tried to hang with him more than that, but it always seems like he has plans with you guys.”

“Yeah there’s always something going on,” Clarke laughs like she and Monty just smoke joints and walk around the campus park instead of spending their time doing monster research. “He’s told me about you,” Clarke tries and it makes Harper’s cheeks flush and her eyes spark hopefully. It’s the right angle and Clarke settles into it. “You guys take…”

“Bio-chem,” Harper says with a little half shrug that borders on nonchalance. “Monty helps me out a ton.”

“If he does, I don’t think he minds,” Clarke says and Harper bites back her smile as she pulls her shawl closer around her. “You know, you’re always welcome to come round to one of our parties some time,” Clarke bullshits easily. “It’s small gatherings usually, but it’s always fun. Booze, weed, good jams.”

“I’d love to!” Harper says, lighting up again. “Thanks Clarke.”

“Of course,” Clarke says and lets the silence settle for them for a little while. She gives herself the time it takes to read a couple pages and solve a few problems and take a few scattered notes. She waits until a group of freshman girls walk past their table before she looks up like she’s watching them and then glances at Harper.

“Monty was telling me that one of your friends hasn’t been showing up to class? That sounds pretty shitty.”

“Oh,” Harper says, looking up, pretty face serious. “Yeah, Fox. I heard she had to take a mental health leave.”

“That’s so scary,” Clarke says, putting her chin in her palm and shaking her head. “I mean, I nearly flunked out because of stress last year. College is a real adjustment.”

“Yeah, I hear that,” Harper says. “But, you know, Fox never seemed that stressed. She has that big group of friends- sometimes they hang with Adam’s crew, you know?” Clarke shakes her head. “Trina and Pascal?” Harper tries and Clarke gives a small _ah_ and nods like she knows those names. “Yeah, and she was telling me how she was getting an in with her French tutor for a dealer. Every time I saw her, she seemed so happy.”

“French tutor?” Clarke asks carefully. “Was she struggling?”

“No, I think she said she was placed in French 204 and just needed a little help getting caught up to speed.” Harper turns her hands over like she isn’t sure. “But yeah, I saw her in the hall bathroom on Saturday night, doing her makeup with Trina. Looked it was for that Deke ABC costume party,” Harper rolls her eyes, and Clarke quirks her lips up sardonically. “And then she apparently went home Sunday. Didn’t even pack up her room.”

“Shit,” Clarke says, leaning back in her chair like it’s good, if worrying, gossip and Harper nods, eyebrows raised. 

“I know.”

“Well I hope she’s okay,” Clarke says even as she has the uneasy, unsettled gut certainty that Fox definitely isn’t.

“Same,” Harper says and then bends her head and goes back to her note taking. Clarke follows suit and actually gets some work done after covertly scrawling scrawling _Pascal, Trina, Delta Kappa Epsilon_ in the margins. She mulls over what Harper’s told her as she works. Greek parties are common enough hunting grounds for vampires, but if Fox disappeared from a frat party, she’d be the fifth freshman girl to do so since the year began. The teenage vamp she’d dusted the previous week, Clarke had been sure he’d been responsible for the others. But what if he wasn’t?

One less vampire in the world, sure, but it means Clarke missed something vital. And Fox’s disappearance, that’s on her. Clarke feels her stomach turn over and a sick, nauseous headache set in behind her eyes. 

Has she been too presumptive? Blake wasn’t so off base in his suggestion of assume horses, not zebras: usually that held true for most demon occurrences, and that’s what Clarke’s been working off the past few weeks in her stab at self-imposed independent Slaying. Girls missing from parties? Assume local, similarly aged vampires. But what if in her refusal to turn back to Kane for help, she’s missed a bigger problem?

“Hey,” Clarke says suddenly, looking up at Harper who’s slow to lift her head this time, clearly immersed in her studying. “Did you ever catch the name of Fox’s French tutor?” Harper’s eyebrows crease in confusion and Clarke fibs, “I’ve been trying to teach myself French, but you know how it is- sometimes you need someone who knows what they’re talking about.”

“That’s impressive,” Harper says. “Man, I wish I had time to do independent studies, all I have time for is a club, and even then. Um, Gus? Maybe? But you could probably go to the French department, right?”

“Oh yeah, good call,” Clarke laughs and makes herself stay for another half hour with Harper, occasionally chatting about things unrelated to Fox to keep herself from seeming too suspicious. She pulls out her phone and finds Trina through Harpers Following list on Instagram. She scrolls briefly through her photos to get a sense of what she looks like; she’s pretty, dark haired like Fox and partial to leggings. From there Clarke follows the link to Trina’s twitter. 

Clarke’s in luck and her most recent tweet is from twenty minutes prior, a mildly passive aggressive one that says _Just because you’re studying in the library doesn’t mean you’re promised total silence. #silentfloorexistsforareason #dontshushus._

When the campus bell rings out the hour, Clarke looks up like she’s lost track of time and swears under her breath. “ _Shit_. I was supposed to go office hours. Sorry I gotta dash,” Clarke says as she sweeps her pen and notebook into her bag and wrestles her textbook in. “Thanks for letting me sit with you though.”

“Oh for sure!” Harper says. “I’m glad you joined me. And we’ll kick back?”

“We definitely will,” Clarke says on autopilot and gives Harper a little wave as she swings her backpack over her shoulder and wends her way through the overcrowded cafe to the door. The bright, happy chatter of students giving way to blustery breeze of a bright October day. The sky is deep blue above Clarke as she pulls on her mittens and calls Monty.

“Hey, Clarke,” Monty says, picking up on the third ring. “What’s going on?”

“You picked up recently right? Any chance I can borrow some from you? It’s a Slayer business expense.”

“Sure,” Monty agrees. “You think you can write that off in your taxes?”

“Definitely. Slaying has it’s own EIN. Can I swing by yours in twenty?”

“Done deal,” Monty says and Clarke hangs up. There’s an apothecary turned tea shop on the way to Monty’s apartment, owned by a hippie who Peter Pann’d and never moved away on from Arkville and now makes special blend herbal teas for a living. Clarke likes him, he’s good for always having spell related herbs in a pinch, and the one time he caught Clarke, Raven and Monty messing around with toadstools in a pentagram outside the back of his shop, he’s never brought up again. 

Incidentally, he’s never bothered by demons.

Clarke greets him with a hoarse voice and claims a light flu when Naiko asks her what’s going on. He grabs her a raspberry leaf tea, and when she says she likes it, obligingly packs up a small baggie of the dried, clumped herbs that so resemble pot. 

“Just brew a little of this at a time,” Naiko recommends, smiling at Clarke through his beard. “Should help with the nausea, and help you sleep.”

Clarke ties off the baggie carefully and at Monty’s apartment slips in a second, small plastic bag of pot, just enough for a bowl and borrows his lighter. 

“Do I want to know?” Monty asks and Clarke shrugs as she ties the baggies off so that the pot discretely blends in with the raspberry leaves. 

“Wannabe freshman stoners and how to talk to them, a Clarke special.”

Monty laughs a little and Clarke leaves him with the promise of more information soon. “Oh, by the way,” Clarke says, quickly sticking her head back into his room. “Harper’s cute.”

Monty’s ears turn red and Clarke taps her hand against the frame as she leaves. “Think on it,” she calls back to Monty, because after Jasper and the way things are now, Monty deserves to have friends and a girl that offer him something beyond demons and emotionally damaged friends. He still has a chance.

It’s a short walk to the library and Clarke briefly surveys the ground floor, an open layout with computers and a small cafe before she heads up. She circles the first floor and glances discretely into a few study rooms before she hits the stairs a second time. It takes her about twenty minutes, all told, to find Trina and Pascal at one of the double study carrells at the back of the library. It’s the theatrical whispering and the frazzled looking girl with earbuds that guides Clarke to them, and Clarke sees Trina leaning back in her chair, giggling at her computer while Pascal watches some sports game on his phone.

“Hey,” Clarke says, leaning against table. “You guys are friends with Fox, right?”

“Yeah?” Trina says, giving Clarke an unfriendly once over. Pascal looks up from his phone, glances at Clarke and looks right back down again “So?”

Clarke leans the carrell and shrugs, leaves her expression bored and disinterested. “Gus gave me Fox’s number, said she wanted to pick up. I got word you two were who I should talk to if I’m looking for her.”

Trina glances at Pascal, who’s looked up again, rolling his shoulders as he rocks back in his chair, posturing a little. Clarke isn’t all that impressed. “Yeah, we’re friends with Fox. She went home though. Mental health crisis, or some shit,” he says, twitching his fingers next to his head, like he’s indicating his brain shaking. _Fuck you_ , Clarke thinks viciously but just lifts her eyebrows and hums.

“That sucks. She venmo’d me for the eighth she wanted to buy. Guess I’ll have to write it off as a donation and move on.”

She pushes herself back up and makes it two steps before Trina is hissing, “Wait, wait, come back.” Clarke glances back over her shoulder. “We all split the cost, Fox was just in charge of paying, you know? So it’s ours.” There’s a whined placation in her tone and Clarke pushes down her disgust at these two and just cocks her head. 

“Alright, come on then.”

Pascal frowns. “Where?”

“I’m not going to deal to you in a fucking library,” Clarke says mildly and then doesn’t wait for them as Trina and Pascal leap up and grab their jackets to follow Clarke down the staircase, out the entrance and then around to the back of the library. Clarke digs the little baggie of dried raspberry leaf out of her back pocket and pinches out the carefully separated weed Monty gave her and packs it into the little bowl she tucked into her jacket pocket.

“Woah, what are you doing?” Pascal asks, looking around nervously. 

“Tradition,” Clarke says, not looking up. “I smoke with all my buyers on their first purchase. Good faith, and all that.”

“Be cool, Pascal,” Trina hisses and Clarke fights down her eyeroll. She lights up and takes a hit before she passes the bowl to Trina, who follows suit. She coughs a little when she exhales and passes it to Pascal, who’s a little clumsier with lighting than his girlfriend. 

“Sucks about your friend,” Clarke says after the bowl’s gone around between them again. “What happened to her? She seemed pretty put together when we were texting.”

Trina takes another hit, her eyes already a little blown from the drug, limbs loose. She mimics Clarke’s lean against the concrete wall and rolls her eyes, shrugs. “Well, honestly, we don’t _really_ know, you know? But we were with her at that Deke party on Saturday, honestly I was pretty crossfaded. You know how it is.”

“Sure,” Clarke says, managing to plaster on an easy smile. “Shit happens at Deke.”

“Fuck yeah it does,” Pascal says, taking the bowl from Trina. “Delta Epsilon Kapa Brothers know how to throw down. That’s why I’m pledging.” He says it like it’s a point of pride. “And they always get the girls, don’t they, baby?”

Trina looks at Pascal, unimpressed. “Anyway,” she says to Clarke, lifting her eyes like _just ignore him_ , “Fox was drunk too. But I think she left a little after midnight. Yeah, no she definitely did,” Trina says, nodding to herself, a little frown on her face. “I was on the porch when she left.”

“She go home with anyone?” Clarke presses, not as careful with her questions as Trina and Pascal warm up to their platform.

“Fox? Obviously, I mean, that girl is seriously cute,” Pascal says, laughing a little under his breath. 

“God, you’re an idiot sometimes,” Trina snaps. “No, she didn’t. She left alone.”

“And there wasn’t any kid who picked her up?” Clarke tries. “No guy that seemed sketchy or out of place?”

“No,” Trina giggles. “Just Deke Brothers and a couple of girls from Alpha Phi. Oh, you know though,” she says suddenly, “there was some kid, on the street.”

“Like, a teenager?” Clarke prompts but Trina shakes her head again and reaches for the bowl back from Pascal, who’s staring very hard at his shoes. 

“No, like a little kid. A girl. She had… braids,” Trina says, gesturing at her head to indicate something Clarke thinks must be a intricate wrapped braid. “I think Fox stopped and talked to her, but that’s Fox, you know? She’s a sweetie.”

“A girl?” Clarke asks. “That’s…” _not good,_ her head supplies. Child vampires don’t target college students. Demons, on the other hand. Fuck. “Weird,” Clarke says. 

“Hey, but you shouldn’t worry,” Trina says. “Fox will be okay. I bet she’ll be back any day now. And, we’re happy to keep buying from you. This is good stuff, right Pas?”

“What’s up?” Pascal says, looking up vaguely. “Oh, yeah, It’s awesome. Best shit I’ve ripped in a while. I don’t really feel high though. Do you feel high? I don’t think I feel high.”

“Always a pleasure to have happy customers,” Clarke says, trading the baggie of Raspberry leaf for her bowl. “Just hit me up when you want more.”

She leaves before they realize they don’t have her number.

A little girl with braids, hanging outside of a college party on a Saturday night. Clarke shakes her head as she walks, not really sure of where she’s going but feeling a familiar energy begin to bubble under her skin. She knows that feeling all too well. It’s the hunter in her, ready to track, ready to kill whatever hides behind a little girl’s face. 

None of the missing girls’ bodies have been found, Clarke thinks. Usually, with vampiric deaths, bodies turn up in dumpsters days later, shriveled and dehydrated, hardly looking like who they were in life. But Fox’s body hasn’t been seen. None of the freshman who Clarke chalked up to the teenage vampire have turned up. And a demon with a little girl’s face is hunting them at night. A shiver goes through Clarke and she pauses midstep. 

A child, out late at night. What would posses someone to go with a child in the middle of the night? If the child needed help. If she were lost. It’s barely been a week since Clarke walked Charlotte home, that worried little girl with a french braid and her hand that clung tight to Clarke’s, vice like, an intensity to her grip Clarke had attributed to fear and relief.

“Clarke, you idiot,” she breathes to herself. But why then hadn’t Charlotte attacked her? Clarke shakes her head, maybe she’s wrong, maybe it’s a coincidence, but she won’t know for sure until she finds out what kind of demon she’s dealing with.

It’s getting on in the afternoon, but Clarke makes for the Art Library, drawing her scarf tighter around her. Maybe Kane will be in, maybe he can help her. She’s made a mistake, a bad one.

Clarke is so lost in her own thoughts, and a little muddled from the weed and the anxiety of having to address a new demon, five deaths in and no known facts, that she doesn’t hear her name being called until Harper appears at her shoulder, pretty blond hair wispy around her cold-flushed face. Clarke is half way up the steps to the Art library and freezes in surprise.

“Hey!” Harper says, “sorry I just wanted to give you this- you forgot it at the cafe.”

Clarke looks down and see her calculator in Harper’s mittened hand. “Oh, thanks,” she says, accepting it reflexively. “God, you’re saving me from myself.” She slings her bag around her side and slips it inside. When she looks up Harper is looking up at the doors to Art Library curiously. 

“You going in there?” Harper asks, nodding at the faded stone lettering that spells out _The William Pratt Library of the Arts._

“Uh-” Clarke says, slow to think of an excuse.

“You know I’ve never been in? I bet it’s the best place to study, and a lot less crowded that DripShot, right?”

“I guess…” Clarke says, searching for an excuse and settling lamely on: “But I hear that the librarians weird.”

“That just makes it cooler,” Harper assures her. “Mind if I tag along with you? I’ll just scope it out for some future studying.”

“Harper, wait,” Clarke says as Harper starts trotting up the stairs, her colorful legwarmers vaguely mesmerizing in contrast to the greyed, weathered stone steps. Clarke can’t think of another excuse that doesn’t make her seem suspicious, and can only pray that Octavia is out with Lincoln, that Blake’s gone home early, that Kane’s locked up the library early. 

The doors are unlocked, which isn’t much of surprise, but Clarke’s still disappointed. Harper hums as she pushes the heavy door open and looks back at Clarke conspiratorily over her shoulder. “Woah, this is so cool,” she whispers. “Very ‘creepy library’ aesthetic, I like it.”

She lingers in the doorway and surveys the hushed, bleakly lit shelves. 

“It is that,” Clarke says and catches up with Harper. Miraculously, Blake isn’t at the big table and something in Clarke eases a little. As long as Harper doesn’t look too carefully at the books, they should be ok. “I just usually come in get away from the hustle of campus. Not much too it really.”

“No, no it’s really cool,” Harper insists, and walks curiously to one of the second shelves in, wandering down the aisle and Clarke breathes a sigh of relief that she’s not interested in venturing deeper into the library. The front shelves were all for show, historical art textbooks that no one actually taught from anymore, a few random gardening books thrown in, a few of the diaries from an incredibly irresponsible Watcher who never mentioned his Slayer except once, and simply called her _that girl_. 

Clarke follows Harper down the aisle, watching as Harper scans the shelves. Harper looks up and grins at her. “This is fun,” she says. “I love old buildings and libraries. Always gives me a rush, like something’s going to jump out at me.” 

Clarke lifts an eyebrow, humming. “I never saw the appeal of that feeling,” she says and traces her fingers along the dusty shelf rims. 

“No? You don’t like getting scared for fun?” Around them, the library creaks as it settles on its foundations. The heater clicks on, a pipe wines, something thumps. 

“Never really been what I’d call fun,” Clarke says dryly. “You a horror movie kind of girl?”

“Oh yeah,” Harper laughs, “Blair Witch Project, Mama, even a couple episodes of Buffy… they used to terrify me but I feel like once you grow up and realize monsters aren’t real, it’s just fun.” Harper gives her shoulders a little bounce and Clarke smiles a little wryly. 

“Oh look,” Harper says, distracted, “this textbook is from 1874. That’s crazy.” She pulls the worn, nearly crumbling textbook out from the shelf and lets it fall open in her hands. She traces the gold, flaking lettering of it before shaking her head and lifting it to put back in the shelf when she freezes.

Clarke hears her sharp gasp and the surprise on Harper’s face morphs into terror as a clawed hand shoots through the bookcase. and swipes at her. Clarke’s heart sinks even as she shouts, “ _Octavia_!”

All she hears is a growl and then Octavia’s leapt onto the top of the bookcase, the bumps and crags of her face exaggerated in the weak light, her yellow eyes glowing as she bears her teeth at Harper and crouches on all fours, fangs bared. 

Harper screams and drops the book and Octavia shrieks with laughter, a vicious light in her eyes. 

“Run,” Clarke yells even as she grabs Harper’s hand from where she’s cowering against the bookcase and drags her towards the door. Harper stumbles after her as Octavia leaps across the aisle to the other bookcase and makes a grab at Harper’s hood.

Clarke manages to push Harper through the doors and then drags her stake from where she keeps it tucked in the back of her belt and braces herself, ready for the vampire’s weight to drop on her, but it never comes. 

Instead, Octavia is still perched on the top of the shelf, laughing, as Blake appears, a dark, fast streak of movement that clears the banister of the second level in a single leap, his strength carrying him to land past the table. He’s a little wild eyed as he takes in Clarke, braced with her stake out in front of the door and Octavia gasping with laughter on shelf. He’s got a book in his hand and Clarke realizes he must have been way back in the stacks, oblivious to her and to his sister.

“What…?” Blake starts but Octavia speaks over him

“Did you see her face?” she gasps, hands wrapped around her stomach. 

The fear in Clarke’s chest turns dark and twisted with anger and Clarke grabs at Octavia’s ankle, yanking her off the shelf, the vampire only barely managing to catch herself on the shelf the last moment and she kicks roughly at Clarke’s chest.

“Hey!” Blake snaps. “Let her go.”

Clarke rounds on him. “This is what you call keeping her in line?”

“I didn’t do anything!” Octavia protests, scrambling back up to the top of the shelf. “I was having fun, Bell.” Her voice is plaintive, a little whine in it. “She said she liked getting scared for fun.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Clarke snaps at her.

“Don’t speak to her like that,” Blake growls. “She wasn’t going to hurt your friend.”

“I don’t give a fuck what she intended to do,” Clarke spits, anger hot in her arms and stomach. It feels good to swear, to get angry. “She just vamped out on that girl. I thought you said you could handle her.”

“I have!” Blake snarls, eyes flashing. “She hasn’t killed anyone, she’s only had pig’s blood, but fucking Christ, she’s a vampire, and I’m trying to fix that as well!”

“Well you better try harder because this can’t happen. Next time it does, I stake her, is that clear?”

“Fuck you,” Blake growls. “You stake her, and I’ll kill you.”

“You need me,” Clarke spits back. “If it weren’t for our deal, you’d both be dead.”

Something dark and nasty crosses Blake’s face and he looks like he’s about to say something else but instead he just turns and tosses the book he’s been holding down on the table, a short, violent motion.

“Jesus,” Blake mutters. “I don’t have time for this shit. Come on, O. Come help me research,” Blake growls as he heads back up to the second level, tension coiled in his movements. Octavia leaps lightly across the tops of a few shelves, she lands on the table, scattering a few of the carefully arranged notes before she hops down and follows Blake sullenly up the stairs and into the stacks.

Clarke feels her heart beating in the palms of her hands and the flush of her cheeks. She figures Kane isn’t here, not after their shouting match, but she checks his office anyway. Sure enough, the lights are out and his door locked and Clarke kind of wants to hit something, frustrated. She goes through the small shelf of books Kane keeps outside his room and pulls _Child’s Play: Juvenile Demons and Common Ways to Slay Them_.

As she heads back out, tome tucked under her arm, the book Blake tossed on the table catches her eye and she pauses. It’s an old reprint of a city planner’s collection of maps, blueprints and buildings of the city, and there’s a one of his shockingly generic yellow sticky notes protruding from one of the pages. On it is written, in Blake’s tiny, cramped writing _Demon guts go Splat._

Clarke flips the book open, and it lands on a schematic layout of an old waste processing plant, and Bellamy’s circled one of the trash compactors, and written “ _For Plains Demon Slayage”._

Clarke stares hard at it for a moment, then tucks the book under her arm as well. 

Outside the library, she pulls out her phone and calls Lincoln. 

“Hey,” he answers her on the third ring, voice a little warped and the sound dripping water behind him. He’s in the sewers, then.

“Hey. Tell me you got a bearing on our Buzz-kill friend.”

“Cute. You’re making puns. Yeah, I know where he is. Hanging out down here in the sewers, under the Water Processing Plant and the reservoir.”

Clarke pulls out the book again and finds the Water Plant, only about a mile from the Waste Processor. 

“Good,” Clarke says, closing the book with a snap. “‘Cause I know how we’re going to kill it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and Kudos always brighten my day!! I love any and all feedback.
> 
> I am on tumblr, crying about the 100 and the election, but in really different ways. [Come hang!](http://verbam.tumblr.com)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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> Mego42 is too good to me and continues to make amazing graphics inspired by this fic. She is a true queen. The queen we need.
> 
> Special thanks to cetaprincipessa and raincityruckus for both being dope beta queens.
> 
> Also, HUGE warning on this chapter for death, some gore and some pretty twisted feelings.

The Plains Demon has been in insect form for the last three hours and frankly, Clarke’s pretty done with the novelty of insect swarms on the whole. Clarke watches it with Lincoln from the sewer shadows, far enough back that it hasn’t picked up on their presence yet. It doesn’t seem very bright, pausing under a grate and buzzing there, one or two of the bees starting to fly up toward the open grate.

“No,” Clarke growls and viciously throws one of the small pebbles she brought down with her directly into the heart of the swarm. At the same time, Lincoln tosses one at the mouth of one of the sewer tunnels. The bees swarm angrily, the buzzing getting louder at the perceived attack and then veering off towards the sound of rock hitting concrete. 

They linger there for a minute, clearly debating and Clarke almost can’t watch. “Please, please, please,” she whispers under her breath. The Plains Demon Swarm has already gone the wrong way twice, and they’re coming up on what the entry in the Demonology suggested was the maximum time it could stay in insect form. They don’t have time to chase it down wrong turns and try to herd it back again towards the Waste Processing Plant. Clarke wants this done. She’s stiff and sore and cold, feet numb in her rain boots, and the sooner this demon is out of her hair, the sooner she can find the Child Demon, Charlotte.

For a long, agonizing moment, the swarm of bees buzzes at the mouth of the tunnel, and Clarke wonders if it’s finally caught onto them. The bees seem to mutter to themselves, the noise of their buzzing getting harsher and angrier. But then, starting with a thin line and the swelling to a wave, the bees start down the tunnel. Clarke lets out a sigh of relief and leans back against the damp concrete wall.

“That’s the last one,” she says, looking down at the map of the sewers. 

“Ok,” Lincoln says, rising and shaking out his arms. “You want to stay down here and make sure it goes up or you want to be bait?”

“I’ll take bait over sewers any day,” Clarke says and heads toward the ladder up to the manhole cover and starts to climb.

“Hey,” Lincoln calls after her, and Clarke turns back, expectant. “Be safe,” he says. She’s usually the one to say it when she splits off on a mission and Lincoln is frowning at her, not angry but considering. Almost wary of the change.

“Right,” Clarke says, giving herself a shake. “Be safe. Um, you too.”

“Will do,” Lincoln says, but Clarke feels his eyes on her as she climbs up and pushes the manhole cover up. She’s right outside the Waste Processing Plant. It stinks, almost worse than the sewers and Clarke sucks in a sharp breath as she kicks the manhole cover back in place, nods at a couple staring at her in shock, and hurries around the side of the building. According to the blueprints Blake had dug up, there’s a side door. She finds it easily enough and kicks it in. The door explodes inward from the frame with a loud enough bang that Clarke doubts she’s going to need to do much else to get the demon’s attention. 

Still, waste not, want not. She counts her steps, the exact, careful stride that Kane had spent hours drilling into her head that measure perfect feet, and finds the grate that leads down to the vents and ultimately to the sewers without any problem. She unshoulders her backpack and pours out the jars of honey around the vent. The sweet, cloying smell nearly makes her gag in combination with the putrid air of the plant, but she tugs up the loose bandana around her neck to cover her face and drops back into the shadows.

She doesn’t even make it to a count of 60 before the first of the Plains Demon bees erupt out of the vent and begin to swarm over the honey, the cloud of them getting thicker and darker as more rise from the sewers. 

It takes its solid shape almost before the last bee makes it through the grate, and its hulking dark shape lands heavily, with a discernable quaver of exhaustion onto four legs. Its horned skull lifts to scent the air and Clarke prays that her smell is covered by the stink of the plant around her. She can’t smell worse than shit does… she thinks she would have noticed that.

Apparently satisfied that it’s alone, the Demon drops its head and its tri-pronged tongue begins to lap up the dripping honey. Clarke lets herself breath out a careful sigh. If the Demon is eating in it’s true form, it was at the end of it’s ability to swarm- it wouldn’t be able to switch back to it’s hive state for a few hours. Well, ever, Clarke thinks darkly, drawing the butcher knife from her leg holster, since she’ll kill it before it gets another chance to.

Clarke gathers her legs under her and then springs, as quietly and as deadly as she knows how, straight at the demon. It looks up at the last second, and Clarke swears out a gritted _fuck_ as it rears back and Clarke’s calculated leap goes awry. She falls roughly on her shoulder and has to twist up and away off the strength of one, only half planted hand as the demon takes a swipe at her with its curved horns. It manages to graze her in the side and Clarke hisses, missing her landing and tumbling again back onto her shoulder.

“Fine, you’re still in fighting shape,” Clarke grits out, ramming her knife back into its sheath. “It’d be easier on us if you’d just give up. No raging needed, just go gently into the shitty night, or wherever you came from.”

In answer, the Plains Demon throws back its head and bellows, and then charges. The weird, hulking form, a strange hybrid of buffalo and giant insect, barrels towards her and Clarke only barely manages to roll out of the way, avoids getting trampled by it’s hard, heavy exoskeleton. The Demon rounds, looking for a second charge, and Clarke scrambles toward one of the twisting metal scaffolds around the tanks and vaults herself up and over onto the stairs. Below, the Demon runs nearly headlong into the tank, making the scaffolding shake.

Clarke runs up the stairs. Her shoulder aches, her side is wet with blood, but she knows what she has to do. She gets high enough up that she can leap and catch the bar of the elevated catwalk and hauls herself up onto it. Below her, the Demon roars and Clarke takes off across the catwalk, hoping that her memory and Blake’s blueprints are both solid enough that this isn’t a death wish. 

She can hear the gallop of the Demon’s cloven feet beneath her, the bang and crash as it runs headlong through smaller pieces of machinery. Clarke reaches the end of the catwalk and leaps nearly on blind faith, hands extended, and just manages to grasp a rafter hidden in the darkness of the upper reaches of the ceiling. 

She clings to it for half a second, long enough to get her bearings, and then drops, with pinpoint accuracy that is innate to her very being, down onto the Demon. She catches it by its horns, squeezes her legs around its shoulders to hold on. As it bucks and growls under her, Clarke wrenches its head to the left and tries to steer it as best as she can. 

Clarke stays low against its body as the Demon twists, trying to dislodge her, throw her off. The handle of the hunting knife is cold comfort in her hand when she reaches for it. Drawing it for a second time, Clarke leans precariously forward, dragging the Demon’s head back and squeezing her thighs tightly against the thin, slippery shoulders to anchor herself. She slashes at the Demon’s face. The knife hits the Demon’s nose on her first try, bouncing off it’s shell, jarring her arm. Clarke tries again, with better luck. The Demon screams in rage and pain as she blinds it in one eye, her knife coming away with yellow blood. 

It careens into one huge tank and then another, trying to knock her off. Clarke’s leg gets slammed painfully between the bulk of the demon and the ungiving metal of tank. She feels the painful crunch of bone, and wrenches the Demon’s head to the left. It stumbles and her leg gets relief. They’re so close to where she needs it to be. 

Clarke gathers herself as much as she can and flips up and over the Demon’s head as it stumbles away from the tank. She lands unsteadily, her knee nearly giving, and takes off as fast as she can. The Demon follows her nearly blind, the crash of its ungainly body just a little too close for her comfort.

“Come on, come on, come on,” Clarke urges herself or the Demon, she’s not sure. Up ahead is the huge septic tank, and Clarke swings a desperate left. She’s further than she meant to get. To the right is the conveyer belt, the shredding machine. Clarke feels the shift in the air and ducks just in time as a jagged, broken piece of metal flies over head.

She takes another quick turn at the piled, compressed bricks of trash and up ahead, the compressing machine hums to life. She ducks again at a whoosh in the air, and just misses the sweep of the demon’s horns. It’s gaining on her. The compressor slams down hard on the titanium and lifts up, Clarke takes her chance. She dives onto the platform of the machine. The demon follows her. There’s a whistle as the compressor drops and Clarke just manages to roll off the platform at the last second. There’s a sickening squish and yellow blood oozes from the between the platform and the compressor. 

Clarke makes a face as she catches her breath and pushes herself back up to stand. Her knee wobbles and reaches down to steady it.

“You okay?” Lincoln asks her, flipping a switch to turn off the machine. “You’re bleeding.”

Clarke looks down at her side and the sticky warmth that makes her shirt cling to her side. “Paper cut,” she fibs. 

“Sit,” Lincoln says, nodding toward the unmoving conveyor belt. “Let me look.”

“It’s fine,” Clarke promises brushing him off. “It’s already starting to heal. Nice timing with the machine.”

“Nice work with the Demon,” Lincoln responds, but he’s eyes still linger on his side, drop to her knee. Clarke bristles, leans more weight onto her knee even though it screams in protest. Lincoln raises his eyes to her again, looks like he wants to say something. Instead, he says, “You think we should clean it up?”

Clarke tsks, glancing at the growing puddle of demon guts on the floor. “I think our debt to society is paid through Demon slaying. I’m not huge on the clean up.”

“I’m going to side with you on this one,” Lincoln admits and they share a ghost of a smile. “Come on, I’ll walk you home.”

“Nah, I’m good,” Clarke promises. She can’t make it without limping, and can’t stand to have Lincoln see her show weakness. She knows all it needs is ice, but with her heightened adrenaline and the fight the demon put up, she’s not in the mood to be coddled. There’s also an odd, incomplete feeling in her chest. The demon was dead, but not by her hand, not really, and there’s a dark murmur in her chest that’s left unsatisfied.

That’s not something she feels like facing in front of Lincoln either, hits too close to home with their conversation a few weeks back in Kane’s backyard. Clarke waves him off once they’re outside the plant, the kicked in door stood up delicately in its place again. She promises to go home to rest up. She patrols instead, itching for a fight even with her knee feeling as off as it is.

There’s nothing out tonight though. No vampires, no random demons looking for a fight. She goes so far as swinging past of the local demon hangouts, but it’s closed up. Clarke stuffs her hands in her pockets and limps towards home. She’s on the far side of campus from her place, and while she knows better than to walk through campus with a limp and a knife strapped to her leg, Clarke’s too tired to skirt her way around it. She ends up taking sorority row, drawn by the lights maybe, the life. She’s not sure. Not really paying attention to much more than that it’s the fastest and most masochistic way home, wandering past the warm houses and the collegiate life she’ll never get a chance to have. There’s one party starting to empty down at the end of the street, a few voices lifting in laughter, a few girls stumbling in their high heels, wavering unsteadily as they begin to walk home. There are two girls though, who stop on the sidewalk and seem to be in earnest conversation with a shorter figure. A little girl with braids wrapped around her head, a small, pinched face. A demon child targeting sororities. _Charlotte_.

“Charlotte,” Clarke shouts and hurries across the street, with assumed worry. “Honey, I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

The two girls look up, relief on their faces. “Do you know her?” One of the girls asks. 

“My cousin,” Clarke says, dropping a hand on Charlotte’s shoulder. “Thank you so much for finding her!”

“She found us,” the other girl pipes up. “We were going to walk her home but-”

“I got it, obviously,” Clarke says. Charlotte’s not saying anything between them, but Clarke feels the fine tension in her body. “Come on, Charlotte.”

They’re a few houses down the street when Charlotte whispers, “I’m so hungry. I need to eat.”

“Is that what you’ve been doing?” Clarke asks. “Eating them?”

“They feel so much,” Charlotte says, and there’s a growl underlying her voice. “So much life.”

Clarke guides them into a dark alleyway, chained off at the end. She stands between Charlotte and the entrance. The little girl backs into a wall, her small frame shaking and something in Clarke’s chest goes cold. 

“What are you?” Clarke asks her.

“Are you going to kill me?” Charlotte asks, looking up at Clarke with sacred, lonely eyes. 

“You’ve been killing people,” Clarke says, almost helplessly. “And I’m the Slayer.”

“I need to eat,” Charlotte repeats fingers curling into the jacket that’s much too big on her. “I need to _feel_. I can’t feel, don’t you get it?” Her voice rises in anxiety. “I want to feel what they do. They’re bright and happy and excited and nervous. I never got to have that.”

“I walked you home, and you never attacked me,” Clarke says slowly, the cold in her chest getting colder, dread growing in her stomach. Her knife burns against her thigh. “Why, Charlotte?”

Charlotte’s eyes search hers. “You aren’t like them,” she says. “ There’s nothing in you that I want.” Charlotte stares, as if mesmerized, at Clarke. “You’re just like me, you want what I do.”

“I’m don’t,” Clarke snaps, anger and shock rising sharp in her chest. “I’m not like you. I’m human.”

“You don’t feel human,” Charlotte says, with child-like bluntness. “You feel like me.”

“I…” Clarke can’t finish the thought because, she realizes with a vague sense of horror, that maybe that’s all she really is anymore. Maybe Clarke Griffin is already gone, maybe Clarke Griffin started dying right about the time she dusted her father and her best friend, and it’s only now just caught up with her. Maybe all that’s left is the cold darkness that’s been slowly consuming her. Clarke shakes her head, trying to dispel the thought. In her distraction, Charlotte makes a break for it. 

Clarke tries to make it quick, but she’s caught off guard. She’s sloppy in drawing her knife, sloppy with her hurt knee, and she’s not used to child-sized demons. It takes three brutal strikes to take Charlotte down, blood spurting, splashing them both. Charlotte cries as she dies, blue blood seeping between her fingers as she clutches her stomach, eyes morphed to black orbs as she stares up at Clarke, wispy colors seeping from her mouth as her breath comes in rattles and gasps. It takes too long, and Clarke feels paralyzed, frozen, until the demon finally dies.

Charlotte’s blood is cold on her hands, and wet. Clarke lifts them, staring at the inky stain and realizes with a sudden, awful jolt, that she’s smiling. It’s a wide, frantic smile that stretches her lips across her face, her teeth bared with it. She tries to gain control of her face but it takes a moment. There’s a sense of completion, the feeling that she was missing in slaying the Plain’s Demon is now what keeps her grinning. 

“Stop it,” Clarke snaps at herself, but it comes out like a giggle and she looks down at her hands, looks down at the body of the demon, childlike and innocent with blood smudged across her lips and the long, deep gash slowly staining the front of her American Apparel hoodie black. “Stop it,” she says again and catches the wobble in her voice, can’t tell if it’s laughter or tears. It shocks her enough that the giddiness evaporates and suddenly Clarke is left with cold, wet hands and the body of a creature that resembles a twelve year old girl bleeding out in front of her. 

She did this. She killed this thing. A demon, obviously, from the blood but… it looks just like a child. She killed a child and she was smiling about it. Clarke feels her legs shake and she stumbles backward into the alley wall. It’s hard and cold against her back and as she slides down against it, it catches her sweater and T-shirt and rucks them up, scrapes roughly at the soft skin of her lower back. 

Clarke hardly feels the pain as she ends up sprawled on her ass, legs shaking in front of her, hands scrabbling against the dirty seam of the wall and the flat concrete pavement, trying to rub the blood off her hands. She hates blood, and when she looks back up again the body is still there. Of course it is. She killed it. And she was happy.

“No, no, no,” Clarke whispers fisting her hands in her hair and then keening as she feels the cold blood smear across her forehead. Fuck, it’s everywhere, there’s blood everywhere. It’s spreading around the body and when she looks down at herself, she’s stained with ink blots of blue down her front. Why was she smiling?

Clarke feels something crack open in her chest, something raw and uncontrollable, making her whole body shake and her feet kick across the floor without finding any traction. She’s alone. And she’s a killer. And she liked it. She has no one, not her mother, not Kane, not Lincoln or her friends and all she is good for is death. 

Maybe it’s because Kane knew this, knew how rotten her core was that he didn’t bother to tell her about the Council. Maybe it’s why her mother could lie to her for years… it’s definitely why Lincoln can barely look at her now. She can’t be human, if she can so easily tear through the body of a child and end up covered in her blood. 

Wet warmth on her face startles her and when she jumps and scrabbles at her face to figure out what it is, blue blood mixes with her tears and smudges under her eyes. Clarke thinks she should feel sick, being covered in gore of a dead demon and shaking on the ground, but all she feels is the hot, sharp pain of loneliness and the ache of knowing that won’t change. _Is this how all Slayers feel_? She wonders as she draws her legs into her chest and tries to stop the tears. Usually when they’ve come up before she can reign them in, but now she feels like something’s come loose inside her and there isn’t an end to them. They just keep coming. _Is this how all Slayers feel before they die?_

Clarke thinks she knows when her fingers go numb in the chilly air and wet slime on her fingers, but she doesn’t care. All she knows is the body spread out in front of her and the shock of her own enjoyment in killing the demon radiating through her. How long? She doesn’t know how long she sits there before there’s the sound of footsteps and when she looks up, a man is turning into the alleyway, tentative in his nice dress coat and blue tie.

This is it, Clarke thinks. She’ll be caught and dragged into the police. How do you explain that a dead little girl isn’t a little girl? She tries to find the strength in her to push herself and stumble away before the guy can call the cops, but when she looks up at him again, he’s just standing frozen in the mouth of the alleyway, head lifted like he’s…. He’s smelling the air. The blood and… Clarke looks down and remembers the cut on her side from the Plain’s Demon’s horns.

The man grunts and starts forward again and Clarke watches his face morph, go jagged and craggy and eyes glow yellow. Her stake is tucked in her back pocket, her knife still in the dead demon, and her arms and legs feel like lead. The vampire barely glances at the demon before he focuses on her and he smirks. 

“You all alone, girly?” He asks through his mouth of fangs, tone sugar-sweet. 

Clarke doesn’t have an answer. She wonders if she should be afraid or sad or even relieved that this is when she dies. She doesn’t have to wait for it anymore, doesn’t have to wonder about when it will happen. She closes her eyes as the vampire gets close and drops her forehead against her knees, waits for sharp claws to grab her hair and drag her head back, baring her neck. She doesn’t have to be angry at Kane or lonely or missing her father and Wells anymore; she doesn’t have to pretend she’s okay. Maybe it should feel like relief but she doesn’t feel anything, just expectant. 

It’s done.

But instead of rough hands in her hair and putrid breath on her face and neck there’s an odd strangled noise and muffled thump and then silence. Clarke lifts her head and the vampire is crumpled on the ground, neck at an odd angle before the dark figure that’s looming over it drops heavily and rips the head clean from it’s body. The vampire’s body explodes, soundless, and Clarke stares stupidly at the empty place on the ground the vampire had just been.

“Hey,” A gruff but soft voice says. “Are you ok? Are you-... the fuck? Slayer?”

And then Bellamy Fucking Blake is crouched down next to her, face surprised, half caught out in concern and Clarke just stares at him, can’t believe he just saved her life. Blake is frowning at her now and very carefully he reaches out touches some of the blood that’s drying on her forehead. He frowns at the tacky blue on his fingers and looks back up at her. “Where are you hurt?”

Clarke lifts her arm numbly, feeling a little like a child and suddenly helpless and weak in a way she hasn’t felt since she was sixteen. Blake flicks his eyes down to her side, nose wrinkled. “Couldn’t smell it through all the other blood you covered yourself in. I’m surprised he could,” he says with jerk of his head toward the thin layer of dust on the ground. “Is it bad?”

“No,” Clarke whispers, doesn’t trust her voice further. 

“You hurt somewhere else?”

“No,” Clarke can’t explain her knee right now. Can’t explain the pain in her chest. 

“Can you walk?” 

“I-” Clarke starts but the words stick in her throat and she can only look toward the demon’s body again. Can she walk away from this? “I don’t know,” she chokes. Blake follows her gaze and his eyes widen slightly as his mouth goes thin. When he looks back at her, his expression has shifted, a little more tentative, a little softer. 

“Ok,” he says and stands slowly. “Well it’s done now. Come on, you need to get cleaned up.”

“I can’t,” Clarke whispers. “I can’t, Bellamy.”

“Jesus,” Blake mutters, but there’s none of the usual growl to it, Clarke thinks. “Slayer, that amount of blood is going to draw every demon across town and you’re not in any shape to fight them. It’s time to go. Now.”

Blake’s voice is certain enough that Clarke latches on to it because nothing else is certain right now. She looks up at him and hates that his expression is pitying. She doesn’t deserve that, not from a demon that she should have killed. She fights to push herself up, but she legs still aren’t working and they nearly give out under her as she struggles to stand up, if not for Blake grabbing her shoulder a little roughly and steadying her. 

“Come on, Slayer,” Blake spits, sounding vaguely worried. “Are you sure you can walk?”

“I killed her,” Clarke says, and then, surprising herself. “I was smiling. I liked it. I… I…” She stares down at her hands and then lifts them, showing him how they’re drenched in blood.

Blake is silent for a moment but when Clarke looks up at him, his expression isn’t horrified like she thinks Lincoln would be, or puzzled the way Raven and Kane might be, expecting it to be a job well done. It’s just… bleak understanding, like Blake knows exactly what she’s talking about. 

“Ok,” he says, but he doesn’t sound pitying or impatient or anything else, just calm. “Ok, Clarke. Give me your hands.” When Clarke lifts her hands, confused but still a little mesmerized by the blood on them, Blake takes the hem of his shirt and rubs it roughly over her hands, one at a time. They still feel a little stiff but when Clarke flexes her fingers they don’t feel as foreign. “Better?” Clarke nods a little. 

“Let’s get you home,” Bellamy says a little gruffly.

It’s slow going. Clarke’s knee is worse than it was, stiff as it’s healing. She’s limping enough that Bellamy finally wraps an arm around her waist to steady her, keep her moving. His temperature runs so hot that it starts to warm Clarke up even through thick layers of clothing. She’s aware that he’s guarded in his movements, can hear him breathe deeply every few minutes, testing the air but Clarke can barely think about the danger they’re in, covered in blood and reeking as she is. 

It’s a little like walking through a dream. They’re at her house before she knows it, all the lights off, no welcoming windows lit. Raven’s either gone to bed or is out. 

“Got a key?” Bellamy asks her, and Clarke digs it out of her pocket, her hands still shaking, so much so that she can barely fit the key into the lock. 

Bellamy follows her into her shadowed house and lets her go, locking the door behind her. Clarke thinks she should feel indignant, she doesn’t want him here, he’s not welcome here, but there’s a surprising spark of relief. She doesn’t have to be alone just yet.

“Go shower,” Bellamy tells her, still with that soft voice, so strange coming from a demon. “Leave your clothes out, though.”

The hot steam brings feeling back into her fingers, into her toes. Her knee is swollen and purple but it still has it’s range of motion when Clarke tests it. She washes blue and yellow grime from her hair, hisses when the hot water splashes the cut down her side, but she makes herself stay there until the dried blood has been washed away. 

Bellamy is a dark shape waiting for her in the hallway. He’s dug up Raven’s med kit and follows her without question down to her room. She can smell gasoline on him and realizes he must have burnt her clothing. She’s too tired to protest.

Bellamy wraps her knee not as well as Raven does it, but not terribly either. He pushes her shirt up her side to squint at the gash. “You’ll live,” he says, a little callous, but his hands are careful when he presses an adhesive bandage over it. 

“Why are you doing this?” Clarke asks, her voice so much fainter than she wants it to be. In the half light of her bedroom, lit by the streetlamps outside, Bellamy looks up at her from where he’s crouched next to her bed. 

“Because you’re reckless, and I need to keep you alive long enough to be pissed that you’re not just endangering your life but mine and my sisters.”

“Be pissed, then,” Clarke says heavily. “Everyone else is.”

Bellamy’s expression falters and although he doesn’t touch her, he shifts on the floor, still looking up at her. “Hey, listen,” Bellamy says quietly. “You did your job tonight, you know that?”

“I know. It’s all I ever do,” Clarke admits. “I kill things, and I stay alive.”

Bellamy doesn’t answer her but his breath comes out in a long, slow exhale. “Isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, huh?”

“I must have missed the part where fame and fortune were advertised.”

“Trust me,” Bellamy says, standing up and stuffing his hands into his pockets, looking down at Clarke. “You aren’t alone in that.” He considers her in silence for a moment, and then, “Get some sleep. You look like hell.”

“Don’t tell Kane. Please.” Clarke says before she can catch herself. He can’t know that she’s this weak. None of them can.

Bellamy shakes his head, already at the door. “Last thing I’d do,” Bellamy says, his voice is cold but strangely comforting. She hears his footsteps down the hall, hears the door open and close and Clarke is left on her own again, but maybe not so on alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and reviews really do make this grungy grad students heart warm.
> 
> (Happy belated birthday again, Meg),


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s not really paying attention to the bodies around her other than trying to avoid hitting them, but she hears giggling up ahead, the hush and spread of whispers and a slow in the pace of her classmates around her. Clarke looks up and over the sea of people students around her, identifies the cause. It takes her a moment to recognize him, but it’s definitely Bellamy leaning against the wall, drawing stares even as he clearly tried to blend in. He’s slung a black backpack over one shoulder, and there’s a red beanie pulled down over her curls. He’s ditched his leather jacket for plaid that looks ever so slightly too small on him. He’s scanning the crowd and Clarke pushes roughly through the students around them and grabs his arm.
> 
> "Bellamy, what the hell are you doing here?” Clarke hisses.
> 
> “Looking for you.” Bellamy hisses right back. “We need to talk.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently clambering back on this train meant I'm _really_ back on the this train.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who's still reading and reviewing. Y'all make my heart sing. 
> 
> Aside from making amazing chapter graphics, Meg is also building a playlist for this fic? I don't know how I'm so lucky but she is a gem, and you can listen to it [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/megmo42/playlist/6nvY9GHAInajpAjY4qSuDk)

Clarke doesn’t know how she makes it to her morning class, but somehow she’s there, sitting with her pen in her hand and a couple half hearted bullet points on the paper in front of her. When the Professor finishes up his drier-than-usual lecture, Clarke crams her books into her bag, and swings it up onto her shoulder, wincing only a little bit at how it pulls at her side. The slash down her ribcage has already healed since last night, but the skin is still new and tender, pink in a way that suggests it would scar if she didn’t heal as fast as she did. Her knee is still sore, and she tries not to favor it as she tries to push her way through the press of students feeding into the already mobbed hallway. Of course their lecturer had to go over.

The hallway is filled with the buzz and chatter of other students, groups of them blocking the flow of foot traffic so that Clarke has to bob and weave through them. She has an hour free until her second class and if she can find a seat down in the commons she might be able to actually read some of the assigned chapter before it starts. 

She’s not really paying attention to the bodies around her other than trying to avoid hitting them, but she hears giggling up ahead, the hush and spread of whispers and a slow in the pace of her classmates around her. Clarke looks up and over the sea of people students around her, identifies the cause. It takes her a moment to recognize him, but it’s definitely Bellamy leaning against the wall, drawing stares even as he clearly tried to blend in. He’s slung a black backpack over one shoulder, and there’s a red beanie pulled down over her curls. He’s ditched his leather jacket for plaid that looks ever so slightly too small on him. He’s scanning the crowd and Clarke pushes roughly through the students around them and grabs his arm.

“Bellamy, what the hell are you doing here?” Clarke hisses.

“Looking for you.” Bellamy hisses right back. “We need to talk.”

“This couldn’t wait until I came by the library? Until after my classes?” Clarke asks, exasperated. “You know that slaying-school life balance is supposed to be a thing, right?”

“You didn’t show up to check in with your Watcher,” Bellamy says, sounding frustrated. “Besides I didn’t think you’d want to discuss this with him around anyway.”

Clarke exhales between her teeth, feeling a cool dread roll in her stomach. She’d managed to not think about the dark alley, about Charlotte, about Bellamy at all today. “Really? We have to talk about last night?”

A passing girl snorts and glances appraisingly at Bellamy. Bellamy ignores everyone around them and just raises an eyebrow at Clarke, waiting.

“This is why I barely pass my classes,” Clarke mutters under her breath. “Alright, come on. The pit’s probably free.”

“Excuse me?”

“The PhD offices,” Clarke clarifies, leading them back down the hall toward the block of small offices in the middle of the building. It’s still early enough in the day that when she sticks her head into the cinder-blocked room, the only window a high skylight overhead, it’s completely empty. Compared to the hallway walls plastered in posters about upcoming concerts and student unions meetings; funny memes and college administration sponsored posters about good hygiene and safe sex; the pit feels barren. One PhD candidate decorated her small space with a sad, half dead fern, and another has a picture of up a big family. But otherwise, the beige walls and tan-on-black carpeting on the floor remain untouched. 

Clarke lets Bellamy into the room and then closes the door and locks it. She leans back against it for good measure and cross her arms. “Well?”

Bellamy drops into the chair closest and gives her a look. “You want to tell me what happened last night?”

“I killed a demon, it was hard. I didn’t handle it well,” Clarke summarizes shortly. She doesn’t want to get back into this. “You know all that.”

“This a common thing for you?” Bellamy asks. Clarke wonders if she dreamed up the softer side of him, hungry for understanding.

“No.” Clarke bites out. “It was a fluke.”

“What I saw didn’t look like a fluke,” Bellamy says swiping a hand over his head and dragging his beanie off. His curls are matted down on his head. “A fluke doesn’t leave you ready to get sucked dry by a vamp.”

“Thank you for your expert opinion,” Clarke says, drumming her fingers on the door. “Anything else?”

“Slayer,” Bellamy snaps, frustrated. “When I found you last night, you were done, you hear that? I know what it looks like when someone’s ready to die. That was you all over, and you don’t get there from one misstep and stumble. When I took you home last night-” Bellamy falters there and his dark expressions shifts to something unreadable. “Whatever it was, it’s been building.”

“So it’s been building,” Clarke says, looking down. “But you were right- if I die, I know that compromises you and Octavia. And I promised to help you, so-”

“Just, stop for a second,” Bellamy says lifting a hand. “Yeah, sure. I’m not stupid, I know our agreement balances on you staying cool with us. But honestly, if you die, in some ways it’d make my job easier. You and I both know that. No need to play nice with your Watcher and Team Slayer.”

It sets Clarke’s teeth on edge. “Yeah, I’m getting that,” Clarke snaps. “So why didn’t you let that vamp get me. Why the hell were you even out there last night?” 

Bellamy snorts derisively. “Nothing in our agreement says I can’t be out at night,” he says, brattish. 

“Bullshit,” Clarke says. “No way you were out for a evening stroll and just happened to feel like you wanted to dust a vamp.”

Bellamy’s jaw works in his annoyance. “Fine,” he says on a near snarl. “I needed to work off some steam. So yeah, I was out. Figured there were more than enough demons and vamps to go around.”

“You were patrolling?” Clarke asks, taken aback. From the blur of last night, it comes to her- Bellamy’s quiet, concerned voice, his surprise at discovering it was her huddled on the cement. “You didn’t know it was me, when you showed up,” Clarke says slowly.

“No, ‘course not.” Bellamy shifts in the chair, making it swivel ever so slightly. “What?” he snaps.

Clarke realizes she’s frowning at him, not angry but puzzled. That part had gotten lost in the jumble of everything else, the fact that Bellamy had killed his sister’s kind to save someone. “Was it hard?” Clarke asks him, suddenly. “Is it hard for you to slay vampires?”

Bellamy’s eyebrows shoot up and he stares at her for a second, going still. “What?” he asks again, tone different this time. 

“You have a soul, right?” Clarke asks. “Octavia’s a vampire, and somehow you love her and protect her, but you had no issue killing a vampire last night to save someone you thought was a stranger. Doesn’t that weigh on you?”

Bellamy cocks his head at Clarke and is quiet for a moment. “Is it hard on you?” He asks back instead of answering. “‘Killing things and staying alive?’”

Clarke flushes with her own, vulnerable words offered back to her. “Yeah, sometimes it is,” she admits. “All the time, actually. The first vampires I killed- they were my best friend and my dad.”

Bellamy’s face twitches, almost like he’s flinching. Clarke was braced for it, but somehow it still hurts- it always does. When Bellamy opens his mouth, Clarke’s steeled herself for something cutting or even something pitying. Instead, in a voice more graveled than she’s used to, “I'm sorry. Mine was my mom.”

They sit in surprised silence, faint footsteps squeaking in the hall and a muted voice from across the hall the only noise reaching them. Dust motes float in the shaft of sunlight coming in from the skylight, and Clarke studies Bellamy.

“Was she the one-?”

“Who turned O?” Bellamy finishes harsly. “Yeah. Your dad and friend-” Bellamy starts. “Was that when- was that the night you became the Slayer?”

Clarke almost snorts. “The night I was Chosen? The night I found out I was supposed to be divinely blessed and had a sacred duty? Yeah, same night. Hell of a way to celebrate.”

“Same night for us both then,” Bellamy says, chin ticking up a bit. “That fucking Council,” he mutters, shaking his head.

“You knew your mom was a vampire when you killed her?” Clarke asks after a beat.

“It was kind of hard to miss,” Bellamy says, voice cold. “She was long gone.”

“I never knew that I was a Potential,” Clarke says suddenly, not entirely sure where this is coming from. 

Bellamy cocks his head. “You didn’t have a Watcher before you were the Slayer?”

“I did, but I didn’t know. I didn’t even know what a vampire was, or that demons existed.” It’s the first time she’s said it outloud, and the words taste funny in her mouth. That night has never been easy to talk about, but suddenly words are bubbling up her throat so that she feels like she’s choking.

“I just knew my dad was trying to kill me,” Clarke says, dropping her gaze to stare at the floor. “And Wells was holding me still so he could do it.” She can still feel the ghost grip of Well’s hands on her shoulder when she lets herself wander back far enough into the horror of the memory. “It was them, you know?

“I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know how I got the pencil in my hand, or why I was stabbing my dad. It just came from inside me. I killed my dad and Wells, and I thought it was them.”

She drags her eyes up to Bellamy and he’s watching her, lips parted slightly. “It’s not that it’s too hard. It’s too easy: I kill things and stay alive.”

“That doesn’t sound like it’s easy to me,” Bellamy says after a moment. “How long until you found out the truth about what they were?”

“Kane turned up two days later,” Clarke says, looking at her hands. “I knew people didn’t just turn to dust but-”

“You’ve never quite believed him,” Bellamy finishes for her, his voice quiet. “Part of you still thinks you killed your dad and Wells.” Clarke nods, a little mesmerized by Bellamy. “You ever tell anyone that before?”

“No,” Clarke whispers. “I don’t think anyone else would get it.”

Bellamy chuckles a little, but it’s a dark one, sympathetic and knowing all at once. “That’s a hell of thing to believe about yourself without anyone else knowing.”

“Who could I tell?” Clarke asks a little bleakley. “Kane basically grew up reading about how to slay evil things. Raven’s family was murdered by a demon. Lincoln’s only ever killed people when he didn't have a soul. Monty’s with us because I saved him and his friend from a possessed pipe…”

“Everyone else is on team Good, huh?” 

“Everyone else more or less knew what they signed up for. Fighting the good fight,” Clarke agrees, shifting her weight. “Everyone but me.”

“Why not you?”

“How can I be? I killed what I thought was my dad and Wells, and last night- that demon. I- I don’t know what’s in me,” Clarke says desperately, heart beating wildly in her chest. “How am I better than a demon?”

“What, 'cause you're supposed to be above horrific things? That's somewhere in the Slayer job description? If you ask me, I think the myth that Slayers come from innocence and goodness is bullshit,” Bellamy says. “You can’t fight a demon with that. You fight a demon with a demon, Clarke. Anyone who’s telling you otherwise is lying.”

It shocks Clarke to silence and she stares at him. 

“Listen,” Bellamy says, tone somewhere between impatient and urgent. “Everything I’ve read about Slayer lore, from the first Slayer- there’s nothing pretty about it. The Slayer is dark, and twisted, and angry, but it doesn’t mean it’s evil. Just because it’s in you doesn’t mean you don’t have control of it.”

Clarke tips her head back against the door, not quite able to look at him. “What makes me different from what I’m killing?”

“That’s up to you to decide,” Bellamy says leaning forward on his thighs. “But you want to know the first thing I did after I turned myself into a demon? I went across the street and asked the old woman who used to babysit for Octavia to come over. I let Octavia kill her and suck her dry, because I wanted my little sister to trust me again. You ever done anything like that?”

Clarke looks at him for a long moment and shakes her head. 

“That wasn’t the demon in me,” he tells her. “I did it because it was the easiest thing to do. And you get why I did.” Bellamy’s fingers curl into his palms. “ But just because you’ve got darkness in you doesn’t make you a bad person, Clarke. It means you can see the shades of darkness: that it’s not all black and white like everyone else wants to believe.”

“Lucky me,” Clarke says dryly.

“Hey, I’m not saying it’s easy.” Bellamy studies her carefully. “What you’re feeling, it’s a lot to take on when you don’t think anyone else sees it the way you do. And maybe no one else does, not yet. But it’s not something you should carry on your own. Not if you want to stay alive.”

“And if I don’t?” Clarke asks bluntly.

“If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have let me get you home last night.” Bellamy sighs and pushes himself up from the chair. “Judging from what I’ve seen, when you have your mind set on something, you see it through.”

He stuffs his hands into his pockets and they consider each other across the span of the floor. Something feels cracked open in her chest. She can’t remember the last time she’s been so honest, and as painful as it is, there’s relief too. 

“Anyway,” Bellamy says abruptly. “I’ve got work to do, and I’m sure as shit not getting it down here. We good?”

“Who do I share it with?” Clarke asks him, not moving out of the way yet. “If I don’t want to carry it alone?”

“Well, I’ve never been told I’m much of a listener,” Bellamy admits, shifting a little. “But you’re helping us out, so if there’s no one else, you’ve got me. And O, too.”

“Really?” Clarke laughs at the absurdity. “You think a vampire cares about this?”

“A Vampire that would have been one hell of a Slayer, if she’d gotten the chance,” Bellamy tells her. “She still remembers who she used to be.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Clarke says, and steps out of the way so Bellamy can get to the door. “Hey, thank you, I think. For saving my life last night. And for this.”

“Did this help?” Bellamy asks, almost dubious, hand on the doorknob. 

“I don’t know,” Clarke admits. “But, it’s different from what anyone else is selling.”

Bellamy’s lips do something funny, and Clarke realizes he’s trying not to smile. “Well this one was free. Next time I charge.”

“Right, I’ll take it out of your room and board,” Clarke snarks and Bellamy does smile at that, but he hides it under an eyeroll. “I’ll see you.”

“Yeah. Have fun with that school-slayer balance.” Clarke makes a face, and Bellamy leaves her with a sardonic chuckle.

**

Clarke gets five pages of her reading done. She doesn’t take much in, but for the first time in a long while, it isn’t because of the heavy grey fog that fills her thoughts, or the vague exhaustion that’s plagued her longer than she can remember. Now, there’s something buzzing her in chest, like the bees of the Plains Demon, but it’s warm: agitated but not bad. 

What Bellamy said, it’s not exactly comforting, but it’s the first time in god knows how long that she hasn’t felt like she’s feeling her way through murky water, like the chipping mask she’s had in place doesn’t have to be tied to tightly in place. There is a darkness in her, and maybe it is bubbling up more, growing stronger, but at least she’s not the only one who knows it’s there anymore. If Bellamy’s right- if it’s supposed to be there, then it’s a darkness she can tame.

Clarke skips the library after classes. She knows she’s going to get shit for it from Kane and Raven both, but there’s nothing from last night that needs their immediate attention. Lincoln would have stopped by this morning and updated Kane about the Plains Demon. If Bellamy kept his word, Kane wouldn’t know about Charlotte, but he’d know she was ok. 

For the first time in a long time, Clarke stops at the grocery store on her way home. She fumbles for a moment in the produce section, doesn’t know what to get because Raven’s usually the one who takes care of all the food prep in their home. Clarke end ups getting ingredients she remembers her dad used to buy- fresh tomatoes and bell peppers, basil and carrots and onions. She agonizes over types of dried pasta for a moment until the agony suddenly strikes her as funny. She scares one of the employees who’s restocking the aisle when she clutches the shelf to keep her upright in her giggling, because she’s the Vampire Slayer, and she’s in near tears over which pasta brand to buy. 

“Are you alright, Ma’am?” The kid asks, his face a little spotted with acne. He looks unsure if he really wants to be talking to Clarke at all. 

“I’m ok,” Clarke assures him, and grabs the nearest box of rigatoni she can find. “I just don’t normally do this.”

“You don’t normally buy… pasta?” the kid asks, bemused. The absurdity of it sets Clarke off again and she waves him away. Has it really been so long that she’s laughed that the rush of it feels so new?

At home, she makes a mess, but she still manages to make something that resembles her dad’s homemade pasta sauce by the time Raven comes home.

“Clarke?” Raven asks, voice tentative from the hallway. “Is that you?” She surveys the disaster of the kitchen from the threshold and looks at Clarke, brows creased. “What’s this?”

“This is for you,” Clarke says. She motions Raven to sit down, and her friend does, albeit a little hesitantly. They haven’t spent much time together since their fight a few weeks ago, and the food Raven’s made for them has been eaten separately. Clarke feels a little awkward as she passes Raven a plate and then perches on the stool next to her at the island. 

“Listen,” Clarke says carefully. “Raven, I’m sorry about what I said a few weeks ago. It was shitty, and you didn’t deserve it. You never signed up to blindly follow orders, and I shouldn’t have expected you to accept my call on what happened with Bellamy and Octavia without explaining what was going on first.”

“Well, what’s done is done,” Raven says a bit tersely, but Clarke hears the acceptance of her apology in it. “I still don’t get why we’re helping the murder siblings but it’s gone better than I thought it would. And you are the Slayer, the greatest good the world knows. I owe you a little more trust.” 

It’s meant to be her own kind of sarcastic apology, but it hurts Clarke to hear after the relief that came with talking to Bellamy this morning.

“That’s just it,” Clarke says quickly, her heart rate ticking up. “I haven’t been doing well.” Raven’s half way with her fork lifted to her mouth and she pauses, puts it back down. “I haven’t been coping, not with Finn, or Maya, with my family- not with any of it. And I haven’t felt like I could talk to anyone.”

“Clarke,” Raven says, reaching out to touch her knee. “You know I’m always here for you. So is Kane. We all are.”

“I know,” Clarke says. “But the way you all see the Slayer- that’s not me. I don’t feel _good_ , Raven. There’s something in me that isn’t. And I thought that maybe it meant that there was something wrong with me. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t, but you’re the best friend I have. I need you to know this.”

Raven is quiet for a long moment and then she nods. It’s slow and careful, but she’s listening. 

“It’s been harder, being without you. Patrolling alone, slaying alone- I feel like I lose sight of myself, about why I’m doing this. Last night-” the words catch in her throat and Clarke realizes it’s too soon to tell Raven about Charlotte, about the blood on her hands and the body seeping blood. She swallows down the repulsion of her grin and forces herself to go on. “Last night I almost let a vamp get me, because I didn’t know how I could keep going.”

“Clarke-” Raven says, gripping her leg. “What happened?”

“It doesn’t matter right now,” Clarke tells her gently and covers her hand with her own. “But Bellamy's the reason I'm still here.”

“Blake?” Raven asks, unable to hide her skepticism. “I mean,” she adds quickly. “I know he’s playing nice, but actively batting for you seems like a stretch.”

“I know. But he did. And right now, I need him on our team. Just like I need you.”

“You know he’s still a demon, right?” Raven asks carefully, searching Clarke’s face. “Not all demons are Finn. Blake’s been letting his sister kill people for the last however many years, if not actively helping her, and the only reason he’s stopped is because he thinks he can get something out of it.”

“I know,” Clarke says. “I’m not forgetting that, but with everything going on, I need someone like him around. He gets what I’m feeling better than anyone else does right now.”

“You’re not like him, Clarke,” Raven says, and she means it to be comforting, but it stings like rejection. 

“I am,” Clarke tells her gently. “I’m still figuring this out, but for right now Raven, I just need you to hear that, ok?”

Raven is silent for a long moment and then she lets out a slow breath. “Ok,” she says. “I don’t get it, but I love you. You’re my family, and whatever’s going on, I’m here for you.”

Clarke squeezes her hand tight, maybe tighter than she should, but wave of relief nearly makes her dizzy. 

“Thank you,” she breathes. “Thank you.” She only realizes there are tears on her face when Raven hugs her and they stain her shirt with dark, wet drops. It’s been a long time since she’s cried in front of any of her friends, and things aren’t better, not really, but somewhere out there, Clarke feels a glimmer of hope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Any and all feedback is better than coffee to this sleep deprived grad student. <3


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all the lovely reviews! I've been meaning to answer y'all and hope to in the next few days. And thank you as always for being patient and bearing with this fic! 
> 
> My beta is @cetaprincipessa, a true doll and friend.

“Listen,” Raven says carefully. She’s helping Clarke wash up the dishes and, frankly, the kitchen, after Clarke’s adventure in cooking, working on cleaning the last of the plates in the sink. “From what you’ve told me, I don’t think you should be patrolling on your own.”

“I know,” Clarke sighs, accepting a wet plate and toweling it off with an almost equally wet dishcloth. “I’ve been thinking about that.”

Raven presses her lips together. “You know I want to be out there with you, right? One of these days, Monty and I are going to figure out how to magic my knee better, or least magic this brace into something more than this scrapheap.”

“How’s that been going?” Clarke asks, feeling suddenly bad she hasn’t checked in with Raven about her knee in a while. A bad venomous demon bite had left her paralyzed from the knee down last year, and though doctors, witches and even a friendly ghost had all taken a look at the injury, no one had solutions. Technically, her knee and leg were in working order, but without the brace, Raven couldn’t stand, let alone walk. 

Raven gives her a half hearted shrug now. “Same as usual, I guess. But sooner or later, something has to work, doesn’t it? The Ruins Monty’s been translating on venomous antidotes have to turn up something eventually. Something will turn up,” Raven says with a determined little nod. “And then I’ll be back out there with you, slaying demons and taking names.”

“I know you will,” Clarke tells her with a small smile and puts the last plate away in the cupboard. The days they had been able to hunt and patrol together had been some of the better ones of Clarke’s slaying career. Raven had a way of chasing the darkness back, but Clarke half wonders if chasing the darkness back was even possible anymore. What Bellamy had said, it had struck something deep inside her. 

“But in the meantime, until I can,” Raven continues. “Maybe Lincoln can go out with you more often.”

“Maybe,” Clarke agrees a little uncertain. “But he’s on Vampire watch, isn’t he?” 

Raven gives Clarke a long sideways look. “You don’t want him with you.”

“It’s not that I don’t,” Clarke says carefully. “It’s that I’m not sure he can get what I’m going through right now. Does that make sense?”

Raven braces herself on the counter and looks down for a moment. “Ideal world- and no judgement here, I promise- who would you want to go patrolling with you?”

The fact that it’s Bellamy’s name that comes almost unbidden to Clarke’s mind should worry her more, she thinks. Nothing’s really changed- he’s still a self-turned demon that had aided his sister in killing untold numbers of people, and apparently handed her first kill on a silver platter. And yet, he still had saved Clarke’s life, and if her darkness couldn’t be chased away, then he might help her figure out how to balance it. 

“Maybe Bellamy,” Clarke admits. Raven lets out a slow breath but then nods. 

“Ok, I’m trying this new thing of being supportive. But if he steps out of line, then I get first dibs on the slaying.”

“If it comes to that,” Clarke says dryly. “It’s a deal.” 

“Are you going to ask him?”

“I think so. Tomorrow.”

“Kane won’t be happy,” Raven offers as one last prohibitory caution.

“If he’s not happy, then he’s not happy,” Clarke says and Raven snorts, but then cocks her head at Clarke. 

“There’s still something I don’t know, isn’t there?” Raven asks carefully. “Something about Kane? It’s part of the reason you’re helping the murder siblings- sorry, the Blakes, isn't it?”

Clarke bites her lip. She had skated over this part initially, back when she had first briefed Raven and Monty, with the hopes that things would get easier, that the sharp, gut wrenching feeling of betrayal might ease with some time. But the way she feels still is so at odds with the man that she had come to trust so implicitly that it still makes her dizzy. Not to mention the fact Raven has her own relationship with Kane- he’s part of the reason she chose to stay in Arkville to begin with, and the last thing Clarke wants is to sour that relationship- Finn still weighs heavy on her mind.

“There is,” Clarke admits. “But it’s between me and him. Really,” Clarke insists when Raven raises an eyebrow and looks like she wants to argue. “It goes back to Council stuff, but everything that’s happened since he’s been here, none of that has changed. It’s nothing you need to worry about.”

Raven worries her lip for a moment and then crosses her arms. “Listen, Clarke. I am here for you, and I hear you saying that, but it doesn’t take a genius, which I am, to see that the past month has been hell on you. The only discernible change I see is that the Blakes rolled into town and you and Kane stopped talking. Either you have to tell me what’s going on there so I can trust that you spending more quality time with Big Blake is really good for you, or you promise me that you and Kane are going to work this out.”

Clarke takes a slow breath. “What if I don’t know how to?” she asks her friend, picking at a spot of dried pasta sauce on the counter.

“Have you tried?” Raven asks her gently. “If there’s anyone who’d bend backward to make things right, you know it’s Kane.”

“Alright,” Clarke says. “I’ll try, I promise.”

*

She gets her chance to try the next morning, when she forgoes sleeping in to head to the library before her morning class. It’s the first time she’s made an effort to show up early when there’s been nothing to report and as she steps through the solid oak doors, unraveling her scarf from around her neck, she gets hit by a strong wave of sadness. She used to love mornings here- the smell of the books, the faint sunlight and the soft bubble of water boiling in the electric kettle. She liked that this place always felt like home, but now it’s one more casualty added to her long list. But maybe Raven’s right, maybe Bellamy’s right, maybe things can still be worked out.

“The library doesn’t open until, oh. Clarke.” Kane seems genuinely surprised to see her when he sticks his head out of his office and he fumbles with the books he’s holding. “How are you?”

“I’ve been better,” Clarke admits and steadies herself against one of the chairs at the big table. “Are you in the middle of something?”

It feels stilted and awkward between them, and Clarke realizes they haven’t been alone in over a month. 

“No, I- no, not at all,” Kane says and hurriedly puts the books down on the side table in his office. “Did you have something you needed help researching? Something that’s come up on patrol?”

“Not exactly,” Clarke says and glances over her shoulder at the doors. “Can we talk in your office?”

“Of course,” Kane says and ushers her in, closes the door with soft click. They consider each other for a moment and then Kane makes a half hearted gesture at the electric kettle. “Tea?”

“No, thank you.” Clarke casts about for somewhere to start.

“How are your classes going?” Kane asks her, tentative, and when she looks up at him, he’s watching her with an unguarded expression of tenderness and remorse. 

“Kane,” Clarke starts, her voice getting caught somewhere in her throat so it comes out reedier than she likes. “I don’t know how to do this.”

“Let me say,” Kane says holding up a hand. “Clarke, please, let me say how truly sorry I am. I understand why you’re mad at me, and I understand why you haven’t wanted to train or spend time in the library, of course I do. If there’s anything I can do-”

“I know why you did it,” Clarke says, feeling raw and unable to look at Kane. She focuses instead on her boot, scuffing against the unfinished wood floor, the unevenly sunken nails in the rough wood. “Initially anyway. No, I get it, you were loyal to the Council.”

“What Diana did, and what the Council covered up, should never have happened, Clarke. I should have told you. Your mother and I both should have.”

“You could have. At any point,” Clarke says, looking back up at him. “Look, I get why you don’t tell a sixteen year old girl who’s just murdered her father and best friend that she’s been under surveillance for half her life, but at some point the omission becomes a lie. What about when I was eighteen? What about, I don’t know, all the times I bitched to you about the Council?”

“I don’t have an excuse,” Kane chokes. “Other than I thought that you would hate me, and that I would lose you. You’re the most important thing I have in this world, Clarke. I couldn’t imagine hurting you like this, or straining your relationship further with Abby.”

Fury and deep, heart wrenching loneliness mix and entangle in Clarke’s chest and she doesn’t know what to say. She hasn’t spoken to her mom in the past few weeks, despite the fact that they usually text a couple times a month just to check in. Her mom’s single text, _Love you, sweetheart_ , has been left unanswered for the past five days. 

“This is worse,” Clarke says. 

Kane covers his face with a hand and sighs, long and slow. “If there’s anything I can do to make this right, Clarke, please tell me.”

“I don’t know,” she admits. 

“Would it be easier on you if I left?”

Something terrible crunches in Clarke’s stomach and for a dizzy second the world turns upside down. “Do you want to?”

“If you thought it was best-”

“No! Don’t leave,” she manages despite her throat closing on panicked tears. “I… I can’t do this without you. I just need a little time.”

“Clarke, you can take all the time you need,” Kane promises her, looking like he wants to offer her a hug, or a pat on the shoulder but doesn’t trust himself or her reaction. “I understand that this is going to take some time. And that’s ok, obviously, that’s ok.”

Clarke takes a shaky breath and nods, then turns toward the high window to collect herself. Silence settles between them and she manages to calm herself so that her voice is steady when she says, “I’m going to start taking Bellamy patrolling with me. I thought, as my Watcher, you should know that.”

She hears Kane shift his weight behind her and then, in a more formal, careful tone: “May I ask the reason?”

“He helped me out of a tight spot a few nights ago, and he’s been honest with me. I think we might as well make use of his skills since he’s with us. More than we have been.” It’s a bullshit answer, and maybe Kane knows it but he lets it slide. 

“Alright,” he says, “but on one condition. You and I resume our training. I know,” Kane says lifting a hand to stop Clarke’s protest. “You need time to sort things through. But I’m still your Watcher, and if you want me here, then it’s my duty to make sure you get the training you need. If you’re getting in tight spots, then that means there’s still training we need to do. I won’t ask for your forgiveness, but at least let me help in whatever way I can.”

“Ok,” Clarke agrees, surprised to find that a small part of her is relieved. She’s not ready to trust Kane again, to forgive him, but she is grateful.

Kane nods and offers her a small, careful smile. “You’re going to be late for class,” he says gently. 

“I know,” Clarke sighs. 

“I’ll expect you back here at two, promptly” Kane tells her, and it’s like she’s seventeen again and still trying to sneak out of training to make out with Finn behind the bleachers. She almost catches herself rolling her eyes.

*

Clarke dawdles after class to make a point of getting back to the library at 2:15. Bellamy is working at the table when she comes in, no longer undercover as a grad student and back to his leather jacket and black cargo pants. He looks up at her when she comes in and gives her a small nod, but his eyes linger on her, assessing.

Kane is watching from inside his office, and taps his watch expectantly when he catches Clarke’s eye but she ignores him and pulls the chair out that next to Bellamy. “Checking for signs of another meltdown?”

“You look better,” he says, hooking an arm over the back of his chair and shifting to face her. “You know he’s been pacing for the last ten minutes, right?” he asks with a jerk of his chin toward Kane.

“Oh was he?” she asks, feigning innocence but can’t help but smirk back at the way Bellamy’s mouth twists up in knowing amusement. “How’s the research?”

“Uh, dense,” Bellamy admits, looking back down at the book that’s propped open. “I’m a much better researcher when I’m persuading people to talk.”

“Books are harder to beat up,” Clarke agrees. “About that actually…”

Bellamy listens to her with a cocked head. “Patrol with you? Like regularly.” He sounds disbelieving, like he’s waiting for her to laugh in his face at his gullibility. 

Clarke nods. “Until I get my shit under control, yeah.”

“Well that’s your problem right there,” Bellamy says. “What makes you think you need to be more in control?”

“Is that a yes?”

“I’ll lose research time,” Bellamy fronts, rubbing the back of his neck and frowning down at the book. 

“Maybe you’ll learn some new persuasion tactics on patrol. Or at least get them out of your system so you’re less inclined to use them on the books.”

“Funny.” Bellamy grunts, but Clarke can see how much he wants to say yes. There’s a quiet, vicious hunger in his eyes when he looks back up at her, a tension in his body that’s resting on a razor’s edge. She remembers the ease with which he ripped the vampire’s head off, how deftly he dislocated her shoulder when they first fought. Grit and blood and violence suite him.

“Come on,” Clarke can’t help but goad him. “You worried I’m going to slay more demons than you are?”

Bellamy’s eyes spark. “You wish, Slayer.”

“Clarke,” Kane says with a tone that says he’s less than thrilled. “Given that it’s already 2:25, I’m going to have to ask that you cut this short and we get started on training. We have a lot to get through.”

With his back to Kane, Bellamy gives her a nearly imperceptible raised eyebrow and Clarke presses her lips together to resist smiling. She sighs and stands up instead. “So I’ll see you tonight?”

“I never said yes.”

“Didn’t you?” Clarke asks. Bellamy’s grin catches him off guard and he looks down to get it under control.

“Your place?” He grunts.

“Done.”

*

Kane puts her through her paces in a way he hasn’t in a long time and Clarke leaves the Art library sweaty and a little sore from the 200 pull ups Kane had her do as a cooldown. The air is bracing and Clarke watches the puff of her breath as she walks home in the dark. She has only a few hours to eat and shower and get ready for patrol, and there’s a strange lightness in her chest as she realizes she’s not going to be alone tonight. 

Whatever dark alleys and monsters await her tonight, she’s going to have someone at her back. And whatever rears up inside her, well, she’s got Bellamy for that too. 

She hears his brusque knock at the door while she’s still pulling her boots on up in her room. Raven shouts something to her and then Clarke just catches the terse tone of their voices below. She clomps down stairs, still shrugging into her jacket. Bellamy is lingering just inside the door, hands stuffed into his pockets and shoulders rolled forward defensively. Raven’s leaning her weight into the wall, her expression not outright hostile, but she’s doing little to hide the fact that she’s sizing Bellamy up.

Bellamy catches her eye with something almost like relief and Clarke doesn’t blame him. “Hey, Slayer. You ready?”

“Yeah, should be,” Clarke says, tugging on her fingerless gloves from her pocket. “I figured we’d start with the graveyard for any earlier parties and then make our way downtown.”

“Fine by me,” Bellamy says with a little shrug.

“Have you patrolled the West End recently?” Raven asks casually and Clarke tilts her head back, closing her eyes.

“I hate the West End. All the vamps that show up there are super bougie.”

“Hey, they all dust the same.”

“Yeah, but they’re so much meaner in the process,” Clarke whines. “And they insult my shoes.”

“Consider it incentive to dust them faster,” Raven says without any sympathy. “And maybe saving up to buy new shoes.”

Bellamy makes a funny noise at that and Clarke realizes he’s snorted and is trying to cover it up by clearing his throat. “Oh not you too,” she mutters under her breath. “Come on, let’s go before the two of you have the impulse to bond over something. I can’t imagine that’d end well for me.”

“If means we can skip talking fashion, then by all means. I get enough of it from O.”

“Hold up,” Raven says. “You got weapons?”

Bellamy gives Raven an incredulous look. “I’m a demon. The hell would I need a weapon for?”

“Listen, if you’re going out patrolling with Clarke, you get a weapon. It’s the rule,” Raven says, as she pushes through the scrap metal that’s taken over their living room to get to the big oak cabinet at the back. 

“She knows I have claws, right?” Bellamy asks under his breath, frowning at Clarke in confusion. It almost makes Clarke laugh.

“Don’t try to stop her,” Clarke tells him dryly. “This is definitely more for her than it is for you.”

“No,” Raven says pointedly as she unlocks the cabinet and opens it with an exaggerated flare. “It’s because you always lose your weapons and we need to provide you with backup.”

“Hey,” Clarke mutters, but she lets Raven have her moment, because her weapons cache is pretty impressive no matter how you look at it. Crossbows, swords, long hunting knives and battle axes hang from the doors, sharp and gleaming from Raven’s loving attention. Quivers of arrows, garrots, brass knuckles, stake bracers and smaller daggers with blades made from an array of precious metals and stones sit on display on the racked shelves. The top two shelves are reserved for her rifles, both custom made, as anyone who gives Raven an opening to talk about them knows. Both guns are fitted out bayonet style with stakes. 

More mundane items like portioned bags of salt, silver bullets, bundles of st john’s wort, tincture bottles of holy water, boxes of communion wafers, rosaries, crosses small hand held mirrors and more are tucked into the drawers at the bottom. The handwritten labels on those draws, Clarke know, detail Raven’s inventory with pinpoint accuracy.

Raven flashes them a cocky grin, clearly not above showing off her cache, even when it’s to a demon. Bellamy doesn’t disappoint. He gives a low, impressed whistle, hands on his hips as he takes it all in. 

“All this yours?”

“You’re damn right it is,” Raven says. “So consider this a loan. Anything you break, you replace.”

“What if it’s the Slayer who breaks it?” Bellamy asks, glancing at Clarke sideways and Clarke lifts an eyebrow. 

“All the more reason to make sure she’s not losing her own weapons,” Raven says. 

“Seems rigged. I’m supposed to protect-”

“Partner.” Clarke corrects.

“ _Partner_ ,” Bellamy says, rolling his eyes. “With the Slayer, but if I lend her my weapon to save her life and it breaks, then I get the bill?”

“No one said being on Team Slayer came with a financial benefits. Or health care,” Raven adds thoughtfully, glancing down at her own knee.

“Or a retirement package,” Clarke adds dryly, and it’s not funny, but Raven guffaws and for a moment, the three of them are actually grinning at each other. Bellamy’s smile is sharp and dark, a little dangerous, as he peers at her sideways, and Clarke realizes it’s the first time she’s seen him smile freely. The three of them- a lost slayer, a damaged demon hunter and a Watcher-turned-demon are probably the only ones who could their situations even remotely funny.

“Well if I’m responsible no matter what, might as well make the most of it,” Bellamy says and steps up to the open cabinet. Clarke gets the sense that despite Bellamy’s frown as he looks over the hanging weapons and checks a few of the blades against his thumb, that he’s excited about this, like a kid given free reign in a candy shop.

Bellamy tests the weight and balance of a few of the swords and the edge of one of the knives with this thumb before he ultimately decides on an axe. It’s not the biggest of the collection that Raven has, which she notes with something akin to surprise and Bellamy just gives her a look for, but it’s sharp enough that Bellamy had flinched when he’d tested the blade and looks old- old enough that the original inscription on the handle has been worn down too far to read. Bellamy tucks the axe into his belt and grabs a few stakes for good measure. 

“Clarke?” Raven offers. “I see you don’t have that hunting knife I leant you.”

“Sorry?” Clarke winces. “I lost it in a scramble.” She feels Bellamy’s eyes on her and doesn’t look at him. 

“Figures,” Raven says mildly. “I’ll just add it to the tally. Come on, you get your pick too.”

Clarke ends up with a small silver blade. Beyond her stake she doesn’t need much when she’s just patrolling for vampires, but silver never feels out of place. 

Raven locks up the cabinet and sees them to the door, lingering on the porch as Clarke zips up her hoodie and Bellamy rolls his shoulders under his oversized coat against the chill of the autumn air. From the way her darks eyes track Bellamy’s movements, Clarke can tell Raven still isn’t quite sure about this.

“Hey,” Clarke says, catching Raven’s hand and giving it a squeeze. “You’ll be out here again in no time.”

“I know, I know,” Raven says, clearly not wanting to be comforted. “You two go out and kill things, have all the fun. But Blake.” Bellamy turns, already off the porch and lifts an eyebrow at Raven. “Clarke comes home with any new scratches and you’re answering to me.”

“Your Slayer will be alright,” Bellamy says, terse. “She can handle herself.”

“That was generous,” Clare says after Raven’s gone back inside and they’re meandering down the sidewalk without much haste. No good vampire ever really turns up before 10 anyway. “Given the fact that you saved my ass just two nights ago.”

Bellamy shrugs under his jacket. “You can. You’ve been at this for five years, and hell, I’ve fought you. If I didn’t think you’ve got this mostly handled, we’d be gone. But shit piles up. I get it.”

They walk circles around it, but the graveyard is entirely dead. When Clarke makes note of that to Bellamy he closes his eyes for just a second too long to be entirely unaffected by her bad pun. “It’s early still,” Bellamy says, checking his watch. “O didn’t rise for-” he cuts himself off abruptly. There’s a jagged moment of silence between them and Bellamy stares hard at the ground.

“I didn’t see any funny deaths in the newspaper this morning, did you?” Clarke asks, not the most tactful but it gives Bellamy an out.

“No,” he says. “No, O and I, we didn’t see anything.”

“Maybe nothing will rise,” Clarke says, but because she has that kind of timing, a hand shoots through the nearest grave and grabs her ankle. “Or, on second thought.”

She reaches for her stake, but Bellamy’s faster. His axe whistles and severs the hand with a dull _thwack_. The fingers go loose around Clarke’s ankle and she pulls a face. 

“Well that was dramatic,” she says dryly.

“Hey,” he says, flipping the axe in his hand, his grin feral. “You were the who wanted me out here to protect-”

“ _Partner.”_

 _“_ Partner with you. Besides, you also said I could work on my persuasion tactics.”

“There’s still the entire rest of the vampire to slay, and now we have to wait for him to dig himself out with one hand.”

“You got anywhere else to be?” Bellamy chuckles. The next second, the grave to Clarke’s left erupts in a spray of earth and pebbles. Two graves to Bellamy’s right do the same.

“Shit,” Bellamy swears. Clarke pulls ehr stake and manages to just get an arm up to block the first vampire’s clasped hands swung at her head. 

“Ok, maybe you bought up some time,” Clarke says. She wheels around and knocks the vampire back with a high kick to his sternum. 

“No shit,” Bellamy snarls, but it’s through a laugh. His axe only just misses on of the vampires as it barrels into him. He let’s the vampire knock him to the ground but then uses its momentum and flips it off him, kicking flipping back to his feet.

Clarke nearly gets caught in a grappling hold. She pulls her knife from her wrist hostler and slams it into the vampire’s chest. It distracts him enough that she can reverse the move and the vampire lands with a heavy grunt on the ground. Clarke stakes him neatly in the chest. As it’s body shatters into dust, Clarke catches her knife neatly in midair.

“Careful,” Clarke calls. “They’re-”

“Wrestlers. Yeah, I got that,” Bellamy says. His claws are out and he slashes one of the vampires in the face. The other he blocks with the handle of his axe. “The jackets kind of gave it away.”

Clarke grabs the blinded vampire and whirls it around. She gets a stomach jab in for good measure and then stakes it neatly. 

“We must have missed,” Bellamy grunts as he decapitates the last vampire. “The article about the entire JV team brutally dying.”

“Arkville Daily,” Clarke sympathizes. “What it lacks in reporting and attention to detail, it makes up for in op-eds.”

“Comforting,” Bellamy says. He joins her at the grave where the first and, ultimately, last vampire is just pulling itself out of the ground with one hand. 

“You want to do the honors?” Clarke asks.

The vampire dusts easy, and Bellamy tucks his axe back into his belt, running his thumb lightly over the blade affectionately. 

“Still weak on your-”

“Shut up,” Clarke says, but she realizes she’s laughing.

End Part One.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part One may be over, but Do Not Go Gentle isn't. Much more is to come.
> 
> Comments and Kudos always appreciated!
> 
> [Verbam](http://verbam.tumblr.com/)


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